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THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS 
CONSEQUENCES 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

FOUR PERIODS OF AMERICAN HISTORY 



BY 
HILARY A. HERBERT. LLD. 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1912 



, Ht>'3 



COPYEIGHT, 1912, BY 

CHARLES SCRIBKER'S SONS 
Published April, 1912 




a 



£C!. A 301)901 



TO MY GRANDCHILDREN 

THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 

IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL 

WILL FOSTER IN THEM, AS CITIZENS OF THIS GREAT 

REPUBLIC, A DUE REGARD FOR THE CONSTITUTION 

OF THEIR COUNTRY 

AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND 



PREFATORY NOTE 
BY JAMES FORD RHODES 

"LiVY extolled Pompey in such a pane- 
gyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, 
and yet this was no obstacle to their 
friendship." That we find in Tacitus. We 
may therefore picture to ourselves Augus- 
tus reading Livy's "History of the Civil 
Wars" (in which the historian's republican 
sympathies were freely expressed), and 
learning therefrom that there were two 
sides to the strife which rent Rome. As 
we are more than forty-six years distant 
from our own Civil War, is it not incum- 
bent on Northerners to endeavor to see 
the Southern side.!* We may be certain 
that the historian a hundred years hence, 
when he contemplates the lining-up of five 
and one-half million people against twenty- 
two millions, their equal in religion, morals, 
vii 



PREFATORY NOTE 

regard for law, and devotion to the common 
Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver 
that the question over which they fought 
for four years had two sides; that all the 
right was not on one side and all the wrong 
on the other. The North should welcome, 
therefore, accounts of the conflict written 
by candid Southern men. 

Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the 
South, believing in the moral and econom- 
ical right of slavery, served as a Confeder- 
ate soldier during the war, but after Appo- 
mattox, when thirty-one years old, he told 
his father he had arrived at the conviction 
that slavery was wrong. Twelve years 
later, when home-rule was completely re- 
stored to the South (1877), he went into 
public life as a Member of Congress, sitting 
in the House for sixteen years. At the end 
of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed 
Secretary of the Navy by President Cleve- 
land, whom he faithfully served during his 
second administration, 
viii 



PREFATORY NOTE 

Such an experience Is an excellent train- 
ing for the treatment of any aspect of the 
Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the 
Constitution, the Union, and the flag now 
equals that of any soldier of the North 
who fought against him. We should expect 
therefore that his work would be pervaded 
by practical knowledge and candor. 

After a careful reading of the manuscript 
I have no hesitation in saying that the ex- 
pectation is realized. Naturally unable to 
agree entirely with his presentation of the 
subject, I believe that his work exhibits a 
side that entitles It to a large hearing. I 
hope that It will be placed before the 
younger generation, who, unaffected by any 
memory of the heat of the conflict, may 
truly say: 

Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agetiir. 

James Ford Rhodes. 

Boston, November^ 191 1. 



IX 



PREFACE 

In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had 
been United States Treasurer under Presi- 
dent Lincoln, pubHshed an interesting ac- 
count of ^10,000,000 United States bonds 
secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, 
and he told all about what thereupon took 
place across the water. It was a reminis- 
cence. General Charles Francis Adams in 
his recent instructive volume, "Studies 
Military and Diplomatic," takes up this 
narrative and, in a chapter entitled "An 
Historical Residuum," conclusively shows 
from contemporaneous evidence that the 
bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, 
but that, as for the rest of the story, the 
residuum of truth in it was about like the 
speck of moisture that is left when a soap 
bubble is pricked by a needle. 

General Adams did not mean that Mr. 
Chittenden knew he was drawing on his im- 

xi 



PREFACE 

agination. He was only demonstrating that 
one who intends to write history cannot 
rely on his memory. 

The author, in the following pages, is 
undertaking to write a connected story of 
events that happened, most of them, in his 
lifetime, and as to many of the most im- 
portant of which he has vivid recollections; 
but, save in one respect, he has not relied 
upon his own memory for any important 
fact. The picture he has drawn of the re- 
lations between the slave-holder and non- 
slave-holder in the South is, much of it, 
given as he recollects it. His opportunities 
for observation were somewhat extensive, 
and here he is willing to be considered in 
part as a witness. Elsewhere he has relied 
almost entirely upon contemporaneous writ- 
ten evidence, memory, however, often in- 
dicating to him sources of information. 

Nowhere are there so many valuable les- 
sons for the student of American history as 
in the story of the great sectional move- 
ment of 183 1, and of its results, which have 

xii 



PREFACE 

profoundly affected American conditions 
through generation after generation. 

An effort is here made to tell that story 
succinctly, tracing it, step after step, from 
cause to effect. The subject divides itself 
naturally into four historic periods: 

1. The anti-slavery crusade, 183 1 to 
i860. 

2. Secession and four years of war, 1861 
to 1865. 

3. Reconstruction under the Lincoln- 
Johnson plan, with the overthrow by Con- 
gress of that plan and the rule of the negro 
and carpet-bagger, from 1865 to 1876. 

4. Restoration of self-government in the 
South, and the results that have followed. 

The greater part of the book is devoted to 
the first period — 1831 to i860, the period of 
causation. The sequences running through 
the three remaining periods are more brief- 
ly sketched. 

Italics, throughout the book, it may be 
mentioned here, are the author's. 

Now that the country is happily reunited 
xiii 



PREFACE 

in a Union which all agree is indissoluble, 
the South wants the true history of the 
times here treated of spread before its chil- 
dren; so does the North. The mistakes that 
were committed on both sides during that 
lamentable and prolonged sectional quarrel 
(and they were many) should be known of 
all, in order that like mistakes may not be 
committed in the future. The writer has, 
with diffidence, attempted to lay the facts 
before his readers, and so to condense the 
story that it may be within the reach of 
the ordinary student. How far he has suc- 
ceeded will be for his readers to say. The 
verdict he ventures to hope for is that he 
has made an honest effort to be fair. 

The author takes this occasion to thank 
that accomplished young teacher of his- 
tory, Mr. Paul Micou, for valuable sugges- 
tions, and his friend, Mr. Thomas H. Clark, 
who with his varied attainments has aided 
him in many ways. 

Hilary A. Herbert. 
Washington, D. C, March, 191 2. 
xiv 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction 3 

I. Secession and Its Doctrine ... 15 

II. Emancipation Prior to 183 i . . 37 

III. The New Abolitionists .... 56 

IV. Feeling in the South — 1835 ... 77 
V. Anti- Abolition at the North . , 84 

VI. A Crisis and a Compromise ... 93 

VII. Efforts for Peace 128 

VIII. Incompatibilityof Slavery and Free- 
dom 147 

IX. Four Years of War 180 

X. Reconstruction, Lincoln-Johnson 

Plan and Congressional . . . 208 

XI. The South under Self-Government 229 

Index 245 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS 
CONSEQUENCES 



INTRODUCTION 

THE Constitution of the United States 
attempts to define and limit the power 
of our Federal Government. 

Lord Brougham somewhere said that 
such an instrument was not worth the 
parchment it was written on; people would 
pay no regard to self-imposed limitations 
on their own will. 

When our fathers by that written Consti- 
tution established a government that was 
partly national and partly federal, and that 
had no precedent, they knew it was an 
experiment. To-day that government has 
been in existence one hundred and^twenty- 
three years, and we proudly claim ,that the 
experiment of 1789 has been the success of 
the ages. 

Happy should we be if we could boast 
that, during all this period, the Constitu- 
tion had never been violated in any respect! 

The first palpable infringement of its 
provisions occurred in the enactment of 

3 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The 
people at the polls indignantly condemned 
these enactments, and for years thereafter 
the government proceeded peacefully; the 
people were prosperous, and the Union and 
the Constitution grew in favor. 

Later, there grew up a rancorous sec- 
tional controversy about slavery that lasted 
many years; that quarrel was followed 
by a bloody sectional war; after that war 
came the reconstruction of the Southern 
States. During each of these three trying 
eras it did sometimes seem as if that old 
piece of "parchment," derided by Lord 
Brougham, had been utterly forgotten. 
Nevertheless, and despite all these trying 
experiences, we have in the meantime ad- 
vanced to the very front rank of nations, 
and our people have long since turned, not 
only to the Union, but, we are happy to 
think, to the Constitution as well, with 
more devotion than ever. 

It may be further said that, notwith- 
standing all the bitter animosities that for 
long divided our country into two hostile 
sections, that wonderful old Constitution, 
handed down to us by our fathers, was al- 

4 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

ways, and in all seasons, in the hearts of 
our people, and that never for a moment 
was it out of mind. Even in our sectional 
war Confederates and Federals were both 
fighting for it — one side to maintain it over 
themselves as an independent nation; the 
other to maintain it over the whole of the 
old Union. In the very madness of re- 
construction the fundamental idea of the 
Constitution, the equality of the States, 
ultimately prevailed — this idea it was that 
imperatively demanded the final restoration 
of the seceded States, with the right of 
self-government unimpaired. 

The future is now bright before us. The 
complex civilization of the present is, we 
do not forget, continually presenting new 
and complex problems of government, and 
we are mindful, too, that, for the people 
who must deal with these problems, a 
higher culture is required, but to all this 
our national and State governments seem to 
be fully alive. We are everywhere erecting 
memorials to our patriotic dead, we have 
our "flag day" and many ceremonies to 
stimulate patriotism, and, throughout our 
whole country, young Americans are being 

5 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

taught more and more of American history 
and American traditions. 

The essence of these teachings presumably 
is that time has hallowed our Constitution, 
and that experience has fully shown the 
wisdom of its provisions. In this land of 
ours, where there are so much property and 
so many voters who want it, and where the 
honor and emoluments of high place are so 
tempting to the demagogue, there can be 
no such security for either life, liberty, or 
property as those safeguards which our 
fathers devised in the Constitution of the 
United States. 

Our teachers of history must therefore 
expose fearlessly every violation in the past 
of our Constitution, and point out the pen- 
alties that followed; and, above all, they 
cannot afford to condone, or to pass by in 
silence, the conduct of those who have here- 
tofore advocated, or acted on, any law which 
to them was higher than the American Con- 
stitution. 

One of the most serious troubles in the 
past, many think our greatest, was our ter- 
rible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after 
the lapse of nearly fifty years, we can all 

6 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

now agree that if our people and our States 
had ahvays, between 1830 and i860, faith- 
fully observed the Federal Constitution we 
should have not had that war. However 
that may be, the crusade of the Abolition- 
ists, which began in 183 1, was the beginning 
of an agitation in the North against the ex- 
istence of slavery in the South, which con- 
tinued, in one form or another, until the 
outbreak of that war. 

The negro is now located, geographically, 
much as he was then. If another attempt 
shall be made to project his personal status 
into national politics, the voters of the 
country ought to know and consider the 
mistakes that occurred. North and South, 
during the unhappy era of that sectional 
warfare. This little book is a study of that 
period of our history. It concludes with a 
glance at the war between the North and 
South, and the reconstruction that fol- 
lowed. 

The story of Cromwell and the Great 
Revolution it was impossible for any Eng- 
lishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite 
two centuries. The changes that had been 
wrought were too profound, too far-reach- 

7 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

ing; and English writers were too human. 
The changes — economic, pohtical, and so- 
cial — wrought in our country by the great 
controversy over slavery and State-rights, 
and by the war that ended it, have been 
quite as profound, and the revolution in 
men's ideas and ways of looking at their 
past history has been quite as complete as 
those which followed the downfall of the 
government founded by Cromwell. But we 
are now in the twentieth century; history 
is becoming a science, and we ought to 
succeed better in writing our past than the 
Englishmen did. 

The culture of this day is very exacting in 
its demands, and if one is writing about our 
own past the need of fairness is all the more 
imperative. And why not? The masses 
of the people, who clashed on the battle- 
fields of a war in which one side fought for 
the supremacy of the Union and the other 
for the sovereignty of the States, had hon- 
est convictions; they differed in their con- 
victions; they had made honest mistakes 
about each other; now they would like 
their histories to tell just where those mis- 
takes were; they do not wish these mis- 

8 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

takes to be repeated hereafter. Nor is there 
any reason why the whole history of that 
great controversy should not now be writ- 
ten with absolute fairness; the two sections 
of our country have cotne together in a most 
wonderful way. There has been reunion 
after reunion of the blue and the gray. The 
survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty- .» 
four years after the bloody battle of Salem 
Church, put up on its site a monument to 
their dead, on one side of which was a tab- 
let to the memory of the "brave Alabama 
boys," who were their opponents in that 
fight. One of those " Alabama boys " wrote 
the story of that battle for the archives of 
his own State, and the State of New Jersey 
has published it in her archives, as a fair 
account of the battle. 

The author has attempted to approach 
his subject in a spirit like this, and while 
he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is per- / 
fectly aware that he sees things from a 
Southern view-point. For this, however, 
no apology is needed. Truth is many-sided 
and must be seen from every direction. 

Nearly all the school-books dealing with 
the period here treated of, and now con- 

9 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

sidered as authority, have been written 
from a Northern stand-point; and many of 
the extended histories that are most widely 
read seem to the writer to be more or less 
partisan, although the authors were ap- 
parently quite unconscious of it. Attempts 
made here to point out some of the errors 
in these books are, as is conceived, in the 
interests of history. 

Of course it is important that readers 
should know the stand-point of an author 
who writes at this day of events as recent 
as those here treated of. Dr. Albert Bush- 
nell Hart, professor of history in Harvard 
University, in the preface to his "Slavery 
and Abolition" (Harper Brothers, 1906), 
says of himself: "It is hard for a son and 
grandson of abolitionists to approach so ex- 
plosive a question with impartiality." Fol- 
lowing this example, the writer must tell 
that he was born in the South, of slave- 
holding parents, three years after the Abo- 
lition crusade began in 1831. Growing up 
in the South under the stress of that cru- 
sade, he maintained all through the war, 
in which he was a loyal Confederate sol- 
dier, the belief in which he had been edu- 

10 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

cated — that slavery was right, morally and 
economically. 

One day, not long after Appomattox, he 
told his father he had reached the conclu- 
sion that slavery was wrong. The reply 
was, to the writer's surprise, that his 
mother in early life had been an avowed 
emancipationist; that she (who had lived 
until the writer was sixteen years old) had 
never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after 
the rise of the new abolitionists and the 
Nat Turner insurrection ; and then followed 
the further information that when, in 1846, 
the family removed from South Carolina to 
Alabama, Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a 
home because it was thought that the dan- 
ger from slave insurrections would be less 
there than in one of the richer "black coun- 
ties." 

What a creature of circumstances man 
is! The writer's belief about a great moral 
question, his home, his school-mates, and 
the companions of his youth, were all deter- 
mined by a movement begun in Boston, 
Massachusetts, before he was born in the 
far South! 

With a vivid personal recollection of the 
II 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

closing years of the great anti-slavery cru- 
sade always in his mind, the writer has 
studied closely many of the histories deal- 
ing with that movement, and he has found 
quite a consensus of opinion among North- 
ern writers — a view that has even been 
sometimes accepted in the South — that it 
was not so much the fear of insurrections, 
created by Abolition agitation, that shut 
off discussion in the South about the right- 
fulness of slavery as it was the invention 
of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing 
and slavery profitable. The cotton-gin was 
invented in 1792, and was in common use 
years before the writer's mother was born. 
A native of, she grew to maturity entirely 
in, the South, and in 1830 was an avowed 
emancipationist. The subject was then 
being freely discussed. 

The author has ventured to relate in the 
pages that follow this introduction two or 
three incidents that were more or less per- 
sonal, in the hope that their significance may 
be his sufficient excuse. 

And now, having spoken of himself as a 
Southerner, the author thinks it but fair, 
when invoking for the following pages fair 

12 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

consideration, to add that, since 1865, he 
has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is 
no more, and that secession is now only an 
academic question; and, further, that he 
has, since Appomattox, served the govern- 
ment of the United States for twenty years 
as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. 
He therefore respectfully submits that his 
experiences ought to render him quite as 
well qualified for an impartial consideration 
of the anti-slavery crusade and its conse- 
quences as are those who have never, either 
themselves or through the eyes of their an- 
cestors, seen more than one side of those 
questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, 
that this Union has now no better friend 
than is he who submits this little study, 
conscious of its many shortcomings, claim- 
ing for it nothing except that it is the re- 
sult of an honest effort to be fair in every 
statement of facts and in the conclusions 
reached. 

Not much effort has been made in the di- 
rection of original research. Facts deemed 
sufficient to illustrate salient points, which 
alone can be treated of in a short story, 
have been found in published documents, 

13 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

and other facts have been purposely taken, 
most of them, from Northern writers; and 
the authorities have been duly cited. These 
facts have been compressed into a small 
compass, so that the book may be avail- 
able to such students as have not time for a 
more extended examination. 

Of the results of the crusade of the Abo- 
litionists, and the consequent sectional war, 
George Ticknor Curtis, one of New Eng- 
land's distinguished biographers, says in his 
"Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283: 

"It is cause for exultation that slavery 
no longer exists in the broad domain of this 
republic — that our theory of government 
and practice are now in complete accord. 
But it is no cause for national pride that 
we did not accomplish this result without 
the cost of a million of precious lives and 
untold millions of money." 



14 



CHAPTER I 
SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE 

JOHN FISKE has said in his school his- 
tory: ''Under the government of Eng- 
land before the Revolution the thirteen 
commonwealths were independent of one 
another, and were held together juxtaposed, 
rather than united, only through their al- 
legiance to the British Crown. Had that 
allegiance been maintained there is no tell- 
ing how long they might have gone on thus 
disunited." 

They won their independence under a 
very imperfect union, a government im- 
provised for the occasion. The "Articles 
of Confederation," the first formal constitu- 
tion of the United States of America, were 
not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, 
until in 1781, shortly before Yorktownf In 
1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to 
be still sovereign, came together in conven- 
tion at Philadelphia and formed the pres- 

15 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

ent Constitution, looking to "a more per- 
fect union." The Constitution that created 
this new government has been rightly said 
to be " the most wonderful work ever struck 
off, at a given time, by the brain and pur- 
pose of man."i And so it was, but it left 
unsettled the great question whether a 
State, if it believed that its rights were 
denied to it by the general government, 
could peaceably withdraw from the Union. 
The Federal Government was given by the 
Constitution only limited powers, powers 
that it could not transcend. Nowhere on 
the face of that Constitution was any right 
expressly conferred on the general govern- 
ment to decide exclusively and finally upon 
the extent of the powers granted to it. If 
any such right had been clearly given, it 
is certain that many of the States would 
not have entered into the Union. As it 
was, the Constitution was only adopted by 
eleven of the States after months of dis- 
cussion. Then the new government was 
inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode 
Island and North Carolina, still out of the 
Union. They remained outside, one of 

^ Gladstone, " Kin Beyond the Sea." 

i6 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

them for eighteen months and the other 
for a year. 

The States were reluctant to adopt the 
Constitution, because they were jealous of, 
and did not mean to give up, the right of 
self-government. 

The framers of the Constitution knew 
that the question of the right of a State to 
secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, 
too, that this might give trouble in the fu- 
ture. Their hope was that, as the advan- 
tages of the Union became, in process of 
time, more and more apparent, the Union 
would grow in favor and come to be re- 
garded in the minds and hearts of the peo- 
ple as indissoluble. 

From the beginning of the government 
there were many, including statesmen of 
great influence, who continued to be jeal- 
ous of the right of self-government, and in- 
sisted that no powers should be exercised 
by the Federal Government except such as 
were very clearly granted in the Constitu- 
tion. These soon became a party and called 
themselves Republicans. Some thirty years 
later they called themselves Democrats. 
Those, on the other hand, who believed in 

17 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

construing the grants of power in the Con- 
stitution liberally or broadly, called them- 
selves Federalists. 

Washington was a Federalist, but such 
was his influence that the dispute between 
the Republicans and the Federalists about 
the meaning of the Constitution did not, 
during his administration, assume a serious 
aspect; but when a new president, John 
Adams, also a Federalist, came in with a 
congress in harmony with him, the Repub- 
licans made bitter war upon them. France, 
then at war with England, was even wa- 
ging what has been denominated a "quasi 
war" upon us, to compel the United States, 
under the old treaty of the Revolution, to 
take her part against England; and Eng- 
land was also threatening us. Plots to force 
the government into the war as an ally of 
France were in the air. 

Adams and his followers believed in a 
strong and spirited government. To strike 
a fatal blow at the plotters against the 
public peace, and to crush the Republicans 
at the same time, Congress now passed the 
famous alien and sedition laws. 

One of the alien laws, June 25, 1798, gave 
iS 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

the President, for two years from its pas- 
sage, power to order out of the country, at 
his own will^ and without *' trial by jury'* or 
other ''process of law," any alien he deemed 
dangerous to the peace and safety of the 
United States. 

The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made 
criminal any unlawful conspiracy to oppose 
any measure of the government of the 
United States "which was directed by prop- 
er authority," as well as also any "false and 
scandalous accusations against the Govern- 
ment, the President, or the Congress." 

The opportunity of the Republicans had 
come. They determined to call upon the 
country to condemn the alien and sedition 
laws, and at the presidential election in 
1800 the Federalists received their death- 
blow. The party as an organization sur- 
vived that election only a few years, and in 
localities the very name. Federalist, later 
became a reproach. 

The Republicans began their campaign 
against the alien and sedition laws by a se- 
ries of resolutions, which, drawn by Jeffer- 
son, were passed by the Kentucky legislature 
in November, 1798. Other quite similar 

19 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

resolutions, drawn by Madison, passed the 
Virginia assembly the next year; and these 
together became the celebrated Kentucky 
and Virginia resolutions of 1798-9.^ The 
alien and sedition laws were denounced in 
these resolutions for the exercise of powers 
not delegated to the general government. 
Adverting to the sedition law, it was de- 
clared that no power over the freedom of 
religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of 
the press had been given. On the con- 
trary, it had been expressly provided by 
the Constitution that "Congress shall make 
no law respecting an establishment of relig- 
ion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, 
or abridging the freedom of speech^ or of the 
press. 

* Warfield, in his "Kentucky Resolutions of 1798," relates that 
John Breckenrldge introduced the Kentucky and John Taylor, 
of Caroline, moved the Virginia resolutions. In 1814 Taylor 
made it known that Madison was the author of the Virginia re- 
solves, but not till 1821 did Jefferson admit his authorship of the 
Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson was Vice-President when they 
were drawn, and it would have been thought unseemly for him 
to appear openly in a canvass against the President, but by cor- 
respondence with his friends he "gradually drew out a program 
of action" (Warfield, p. 17). The Kentucky Resolutions were 
sent by the Governor to the Legislatures of the other States, ten 
of which, being controlled by the Federalists, are known to have 
declared against them (Warfield, p. 115). But of course the 
resolutions were canvassed by the public before the presidential 
election of 1800. 

20 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

The first of the Kentucky resolutions was 
as follows: 

"Resolved, That the several States composing the 
United States of America, are not united on the 
principle of unlimited submission to their general 
government, but that by compact, under the style 
and title of a constitution for the United States, and 
of amendments thereto, they constituted a general 
government for specific purposes, delegated to that 
Government certain definite powers, reserving, each 
State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their 
own self-government; and that ivhensoever the gen- 
eral government assumes undelegated powers its acts 
are unauthoritative, void, and of no effect: That to 
this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an 
integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the 
other party: That the government created by this 
compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of 
the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that 
would have made its direction, and not the Consti- 
tution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all 
other cases of compact among parties having no com- 
mon judge, each party has a right to judge for itself as 
well of infractions as of the mode and measure of re- 
dress." 

Undoubtedly it is from the famous reso- 
lutions of 1798-9 that the secessionists of a 
later date drew their arguments. The au- 
thors of these celebrated resolutions were, 
21 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

both of them, devoted friends of the Union 
they had helped to construct. Why should 
they announce a theory of the Constitution 
that was so full of dangerous possibilities? 

The answer is, they were announcing the 
theory upon which the States, or at least 
many of the States, had ten years before 
ratified the Constitution. A crisis in the 
life of the new government had now come. 
Congress had usurped powers not given; 
it had exercised powers that had been pro- 
hibited, and the government was enforcing 
the obnoxious statutes with a high hand. 
Dissatisfaction was intense. 

Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly 
Repubhcan partisans, Jefferson especially; 
but it is equally certain that they were both 
friends of the Union, and as such they con- 
cluded, with the lights before them, that 
the wise course would be to submit to the 
people, in ample time for full consideration, 
before the then coming presidential election, 
a full, clear, and comprehensive exposition 
of the Constitution precisely as they, and 
as the people, then understood it. This 
they did in the resolutions of 1798 and 1799, 
and the very same voters who had created 

22 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

the Constitution of 1789, now, with their 
sons to aid them, endorsed these resolutions 
in the election of 1800, which had been laid 
before them by the legislatures of two Re- 
publican States as a correct construction 
of that instrument. 

The Republicans under Jefferson came 
into power with an immense majority. The 
people were satisfied with the Constitution 
as it had been construed in the election of 
1800, and the country under control of the 
Republicans was happy and prosperous for 
three decades. Then the party in power 
began to split into National Republicans 
and Democratic Republicans. The National 
Republicans favored a liberal construction 
of the Constitution and became Whigs; the 
Democratic Republicans dropped the name 
Republican and became Democrats. 

The foregoing sketch has been given with 
no intent to write a political history, but 
only to show with what emphasis the Amer- 
ican people condemned all violations of the 
Constitution up to the time when, in 183 1, 
our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. 
The sketch has also served to explain the 
theory of State-rights, as it was held in 

23 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

early days, and later, by the Southern peo- 
ple. 

Whether the union of the States under 
the Constitution as expounded by the Ken- 
tucky and Virginia resolutions would sur- 
vive every trial that was to come, remained 
to be seen. The question was destined to 
perplex Mr. Jefferson himself, more than 
once. 

Indeed, even while Washington was Pres- 
ident there had been disunion sentiment in 
Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virgin- 
ian, John Taylor, of Caroline, shortly after 
he had expressed an intention of publicly 
resigning from the United States Senate, 
was approached in the privacy of a com- 
mittee room by Rufus King, senator from 
New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, a senator 
from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with 
a proposition for a dissolution of the Union 
by mutual consent, the line of division to 
be somewhere from the Potomac to the 
Hudson. This was on the ground " that it 
was utterly impossible for the Union to 
continue. That the Southern and the East- 
ern people thought quite differently," etc. 
Taylor contended for the Union, and noth- 

24 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

ing came of the conference, the story of 
which remained a secret for over a hun- 
dred years.^ 

"In the winter of 1803-4, immediately 
after, and as a consequence of, the acqui- 
sition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the 
Federal party conceived the project of the 
dissolution of the Union and the establish- 
ment of a Northern Confederacy, the justi- 
fying causes to those who entertained it, 
that the acquisition of Louisiana to the 
Union transcended the constitutional powers 
of the government of the United States ; that 
it created, in fact, a new confederacy to 
which the States, united by the former com- 
pact, were not bound to adhere; that it was 

' Taylor was so deeply impressed by the conference, which was 
protracted, that two days later, May ii, 1794, he made an ex- 
tended note of it which he sent to Mr. Madison. At the foot of 
his note Taylor says, among other things: "He (T.) is thoroughly 
convinced that the design to break up the Union is contem- 
plated. The assurance, the manner, the earnestness, and the 
countenances with which the idea was uttered, all disclosed the 
most serious intention. It is also probable that K. (King) and 
E. (Ellsworth) having heard that T. (Taylor) was against the 
(adoption of) the Constitution have hence imbibed a mistaken 
opinion that he was secretly an enemy of the Union, and con- 
ceived that he was a fit instrument (as he was about retiring) to 
infuse notions into the anti-federal temper of Virginia, consonant 
to their views." — "Disunion Sentiment in the Congress in 1794" 
(with fac-simile of Taylor memorandum), by Gaillard Hunt, Edi- 
tor of Writings of James Madison. Lowdermilk Co., Washing- 
ton, D. C, 1905. 

25 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

oppressive of the interests and destructive 
of the influence of the northern section of 
the Confederacy, whose right and duty it 
was therefore to secede from the new body 
politic, and to constitute one of their own.'" 

This project did not assume serious pro- 
portions. 

John Fiske in his school history says: 
"John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the 
embargo act of 1807, privately informed 
President Jefferson (in February, 1809) that 
further attempts to enforce it in the New 
England States would be likely to drive them 
to secession. Accordingly, the embargo was 
repealed, and the non-intercourse act sub- 
stituted for it." 

The spirit of nationality was yet in its 
infancy, threats of secession were common, 
and they came then mostly from New Eng- 
land. These threats were in no wise con- 
nected with slavery; agitators had not then 
made slavery a national issue; the idea of 
separation was prompted by the fear that 
power in the councils of the Union would 
pass into the hands of other sections. 

' C. F. Robertson, "The Louisiana Purchase," etc. " Papers of 
the American Association," vol. I, pp. 262, 263. 

26 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Massachusetts was heard from again in 
1811, when the State of Louisiana, the first 
to be carved from the Louisiana purchase, 
asked to come into the Union. In dis- 
cussing the bill for her admission, Josiah 
Quincy said: *'Why, sir, I have already 
heard of six States, and some say there will 
be at no great distance of time more. I have 
also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will 
be far to the east of the contemplated em- 
pire. ... It is impossible that such a power 
could be granted. It was not for these men 
that our fathers fought. It was not for 
them this Constitution was adopted. You 
have no authority to throw the rights and 
liberties and property of this people into 
hotchpot with the wild men on the Mis- 
souri, or with the mixed, though more 
respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo- 
Americans who bask in the sands in the 
mouth of the Mississippi. . . . / «m com- 
-pelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion 
that J if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union 
are virtually dissolved; that the States which 
compose it are free from their moral obliga- 
itons; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it 
zuill be the duty of some, to prepare definitely 

27 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

for a separation — amicably^ if they can; vio- 
lently, if they 7nust." 

June 15, 181 3, the Massachusetts legis- 
lature endorsed the position taken in this 
speech.^ 

Later, in 18 14, a convention of represen- 
tative New England statesmen met at Hart- 
ford, to consider of secession unless the non- 
intercourse act, which also bore hard on 
New England, should be repealed; but the 
war then pending was soon to close, and 
the danger from that quarter was over. 

But secession was not exclusively a New 
England doctrine. "When the Constitu- 
tion was adopted by the votes of States in 
popular conventions, it is safe to say there 
was not a man in the country, from Wash- 
ington and Hamilton, on the one side, to 
George Clinton and George Mason, on the 
other, who regarded the new system as any- 
thing but an experiment, entered into by 
the States, and from which each and every 
State had the right to withdraw, a right 
which was very likely to be exercised." ^ 

As late as 1844 ^he threat of secession 

•"American State Documents and Federal Relations," p. 21. 
* Henry Cabot Lodge's "Webster," p. 176. 

28 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

was to come again from Massachusetts. 
The great State of Texas was applying for 
admission to the Union. But Texas was a 
slave State; Abolitionists had now for thir- 
teen years been arousing in the old Bay 
State a spirit of hostility against the exist- 
ence of slavery in her sister States of the 
South, and in 1844 the Massachusetts legis- 
lature resolved that "the Commonwealth 
of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact 
between the people of the United States, 
according to the plain meaning and intent 
in which it was understood by them, is sin- 
cerely anxious for its preservation; but that 
it is determined, as it doubts not other States 
are, to submit to undelegated powers in no 
body of men on earth,'' and that " the proj- 
ect of the annexation of Texas, unless ar- 
rested at the threshold, may tend to drive 
these States into a dissolutio?i of the Union.'' 

This was jtist seventeen years before the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to arm 
her S071S to put down secession in the South! 

The Southern reader must not, however, 
conclude from this startling about-face on 
the question of secession, that the people 
of Massachusetts, and of the North, did 

29 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

not, m iS6i, honestly believe that under the 
Constitution the Union was indissoluble, 
or that the North went to war simply for 
the purpose of perpetuating its power over 
the South. Such a conclusion would be 
grossly unjust. The spirit of nationality, 
veneration of the Union, was a growth, and, 
after it had fairly begun, a rapid growth. 
It grew, as our country grew in prestige 
and power. The splendid triumphs of our 
ships at sea, in the War of 1812, and our 
victory at New Orleans over British regu- 
lars, added to it; the masterful decisions 
of our great Chief Justice John Marshall, 
pointing out how beneficently our Federal 
Constitution was adapted to the preserva- 
tion not only of local self-government but 
of the liberties of the citizen as well; peace 
with, and the respect of, foreign nations; 
free trade between the people of all sections, 
and abounding prosperity — all these things 
created a deep impression, and Americans 
began to hark back to the words of Wash- 
ington in his farewell address : *' The unity of 
our government, which now constitutes you 
one people, is also dear to you. It is justly 
so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

your real independence, the support of your 
tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of 
your safety, of your prosperity, of that very 
liberty which you so highly prize." 

But far and away above every other 
single element contributing to the develop- 
ment of Union sentiment was the wonder- 
ful speech of Daniel Webster, January 26, 
1830, in his debate in the United States 
Senate with Hayne, of South CaroKna. 
Hayne was eloquently defending States' 
rights, and his argument was unanswerable 
if his premise was admitted, that, as had 
been theretofore conceded, the Constitution 
was a compact between the States. Webster 
saw this and he took new ground; the 
Constitution was, he contended, not a com- 
pact, but the formation of a government. 
His arguments were like fruitful seed sown 
upon a soil prepared for their reception. 
No speech delivered in this country ever 
created so profound an impression. It was 
the foundation of a new school of political 
thought. It concluded with this eloquent 
peroration: "When my eyes shall be turned 
to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, 
may I not see him shining on the broken 
31 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

and dishonored fragments of a once glori- 
ous Union; on States dissevered, discord- 
ant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil 
feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal 
blood! Let their last feeble and lingering 
glance rather behold the gracious ensign 
of the republic, now known and honored 
throughout the earth, still full high ad- 
vanced, its arms and trophies streaming in 
their original lustre, not a stripe erased or 
polluted, not a single star obscured, bear- 
ing for its motto no such miserable inter- 
rogatory as *What is all this worth?' nor 
those other words of delusion and folly, 
'Liberty first and Union afterwards,' but 
everywhere, spread all over with living light, 
blazing on all its ample folds, as they float 
over the sea and over the land, and in every 
wind under the whole heavens, that other 
sentiment, dear to every American heart — 
'Liberty and Union, now and forever, one 
and inseparable.'" 

Yox many years every school-house in the 
land resounded with these words. By 1861 
they had been imprinted on the minds and 
had sunk into the hearts of a whole genera- 
tion. Their effect was incalculable. 
32 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

It is perfectly true that the secession res- 
olution of the Massachusetts legislature of 
1844 was passed fourteen years after Web- 
ster's speech, but the Garrisonians had then 
been agitating the slavery question within 
her borders for fourteen years, and the old 
State was now beside herself with excite- 
ment. 

There was another great factor in the 
rapid manufacture of Union sentiment at 
the North that had practically no existence 
at the South. It was immigration. 

The new-comers from over the sea knew 
nothing, and cared less, about the history 
of the Constitution or the dialectics of se- 
cession. They had sought a land of liberty J 
that to them was one nation, with one flag 
flying over it, and in their eyes secession 
was rebeUion. Immigrants to America, 
practically all settling in Northern States, 
were during the thirty years, 183 1 -i860, 
4)9io>S90J and these must, with their nat- 
ural increase, have numbered at least six 
miUions in i860. In other words, far more 
than one-fourth of the people of the North ^' 
in i860 were not, themselves or their fathers, 
in the country in the early days when the 
33 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

doctrine of States' rights had been in the 
ascendant; and, as a rule, to these new peo- 
ple that old doctrine was folly. 

In the South the situation was reversed. 
Slavery had kept immigrants away. The 
whites were nearly all of the old revolution- 
ary stock, and had inherited the old ideas. 
Still, love of and pride in the Union had 
grown in them too. Nor were the South- 
erners all followers of Jefferson. From the 
earliest days much of the wealth and intel- 
ligence of the country. North and South, 
had opposed the Democracy, first as Feder- 
alists and later as Whigs. In the South 
the Whigs have been described as "a fine 
upstanding old party, a party of blue broad- 
cloth, silver buttons, and a coach and four." 
It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had 
begun to array the North, as a section, 
against the South, that Southern Whigs 
began to look for protection to the doc- 
trine of States' rights. 

Woodrow Wilson says, in ''Division and 
Reunion," p. 47, of Daniel Webster's great 
speech in 1830: "The North was now be- 
ginning to insist upon a national govern- 
ment; the South was continuing to insist 

34 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

upon the original understanding of the Con- / 
stitution; that was all." 

And in those attitudes the two sections 
stood in 1 860-6 1, one upon the modern 
theory of an indestructible Union ; the other 
upon the old idea that States had the right 
to secede from the Union. 

In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the 
" Rebellion of the Young Irishmen." Among 
the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas 
F. Meagher and John Mitchel. Both were 
banished to Great Britain's penal colony. 
Both made their way, a few years later, to 
America. Both were devotees of liberty, 
both men of brilliant intellect and high 
culture. Meagher settled in the North, 
Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. 
Each from his new stand-point studied the 
history and the Constitution of his adopted 
country. Meagher, when the war between 
the North and South came on, became a 
general in the Union army. Mitchel entered , 
the civil service of the Confederacy and his 
son died a Confederate soldier. 

The Union or Confederate partisan who 
has been taught that his side was "eter- 1, 
nally right, and the other side eternally 
35 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

wrong," should consider the story of these 
two "Young Irishmen." 

How fortunate it is that the ugly ques- 
tion of secession has been settled, and will 
never again divide Americans, or those who 
come to America! 



36 



CHAPTER II 
EMANCIPATION PRIOR TO 1831 

IN the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
ries, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Span- 
ish, English, and American vessels brought 
many thousands of negroes from Africa, and 
sold them as slaves in the British West 
Indies and in the British-American colonies. 
William Goodell, a distinguished Abolition- 
ist writer, tells us^ that "in the importation 
of slaves for the Southern colonies the mer- 
chants of New England competed with those 
of New York and the South" (which never 
had much shipping). "They appear indeed 
to have outstripped them, and to have 
ahnost mo7iopolized at one time the profits 
of this detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and 
Newburyport in Massachusetts, and New- 
port and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, 
in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast 
sums of this rapidly acquired and ill-gotten 
wealth."^ 

' "Slavery and Anti-Slavery," 3cl ed., 1885. 

37 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

The slaves coming to America went 
chiefly to the Southern colonies, because 
there only was slave labor profitable. The 
laws and conditions under which these ne- 
groes were sold in the American colonies 
were precisely the same as in the West In- 
dies, except that the whites in the islands, 
so far as is known, never objected, whereas 
the records show that earnest protests came 
from Virginia^ and also from Georgia- and 
North Carolina.^ The King of England was 
interested in the profits of the iniquitous 
trade and all protests were in vain. 

Of the rightfulness, however, of slavery 
itself there was but little question in the 
minds of Christian peoples until the clos- 
ing years of the eighteenth century. Then 
the cruelties practised by ship-masters in 
the Middle Passage attracted attention, and 
then came gradually a revolution in pub- 
lic opinion. This revolution, in which the 
churches took a prominent part, originated 
in England, but it soon swept over Amer- 
ica also, both North and South. 

England abolished the slave trade in 

' Jm. Archives, 4th series, vol. I, p. 696. 
^Ib., p. 1 136. "^ lb., p. 735. 

38 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

1807. The United States followed in 1808; 
the Netherlands in 18 14; France in 18 18; 
Spain in 1820; Portugal in 1830. The great 
Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, who had 
brought about the abolition of the slave 
trade in England, continued their exertions 
in favor of the slave until finally, in 1833, 
Parliament abolished slavery in the British 
West Indies, appropriating twenty millions 
sterling (^100,000,000) as compensation to 
owners — this because investments in slave 
property had been made under the sanc- 
tion of existing law. 

"Great Britain, loaded with an unprec- 
edented debt and with a grinding taxation, 
contracted a new debt of a hundred mil- 
lions of dollars to give freedom, not to 
Englishmen, but to the degraded African. 
This was not an act of policy, but the work 
of statesmen. Parliament but registered 
the edict of the people. The English na- 
tion, with one heart and one voice, under 
a strong Christian impulse and without 
distinction of rank, sex, party, or religious 
names, decreed freedom to the slave. I 
know not that history records a national 
act so disinterested, so sublime." 

39 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

So wrote Dr. Channing, the great New 
England pulpit orator, in his celebrated let- 
ter on Texas annexation, to Henry Clay, in 

1837. 
While the rightfulness of slavery was 

being discussed in England, the American 
conscience had also been aroused, and eman- 
cipation was making progress on this side 
of the water. 

Emancipation was an easy task in the 
Northern States, where slaves were few, 
their labor never having been profitable, 
and by 1804 the last of these States had 
provided for the ultimate abolition of sla- 
very within its borders. But the problem 
was more difliicult in the Southern States, 
where the climate was adapted to slave 
labor. There slaves were numerous, and 
slavery was interwoven, economically and 
socially, with the very fabric of existence. 
Naturally, it occurred to thoughtful men 
that there ought to be some such solution 
as that which was subsequently adopted 
in England, and which, as we have seen, 
was so highly extolled by Dr. Channing — 
emancipation of the slaves with compensa- 
tion to the owners by the general govern- 
40 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

ment. The difficulty in our country was 
that the Federal Constitution conferred 
upon the Federal Government no power 
over slavery in the States — no power to 
emancipate slaves or compensate owners; 
and that for the individual States where the 
negroes were numerous the problem seemed 
too big. Free negroes and whites in great 
numbers, it was thought, could not live to- 
gether. To get rid of the negroes, if they 
should be freed, was for the States a very 
serious, if not an unsurmountable task. 

On the seventeenth of January, 1824, the 
following resolutions, proposed as a solu- 
tion of the problem, were passed by the 
legislature of Ohio:^ 

Resolved, That the consideration of a system 
providing for the gradual emancipation of the peo- 
ple of color, held in servitude in the United States, 
be recommended to the legislatures of the several 
States of the American Union, and to the Congress 
of the United States. 

Resolved, That, in the opinion of the general 
assembly, a system of foreign colonization, with 
correspondent measures, might be adopted that 
would in due time effect the entire emancipation 
of the slaves of our country without any violation 

1 " State Documents on Federal Relations," Ames, pp. 203-4. 
41 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

of the national compact, or infringement of the 
rights of individuals; by the passage of a law by the 
general government (with the consent of the slave- 
holding States) which would provide that all children 
of persons now held in slavery, born after the passage 
of the law, should be free at the age of twenty-one 
years (being supported during their minority by 
the persons claiming the service of their parents), 
provided they then consent to be transported to the 
intended place of colonization. Also: 

Resolved, That it is expedient that such a system 
should be predicated upon the principle that the evil 
of slavery is a national one, and that the people 
and the States of the Union ought mutually to par- 
ticipate in the duties and burthens of removing it. 

Resolved, That His Excellency the Governor be 
requested to forward a copy of the foregoing reso- 
lutions to His Excellency the Governor of each of 
the United States, requesting him to lay the same 
before the legislature thereof; and that His Excel- 
lency will also forward a like copy to each of our 
senators and representatives in Congress, request- 
ing their co-operation in all national measures hav- 
ing a tendency to effect the grave object embraced 
therein. 

By June of 1825 eight other Northern 
States had endorsed the proposition, Penn- 
sylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, 
Connecticut, Massachusetts. Six of the 
slave-holding States emphatically disap- 
42 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

proved of the suggestion, viz.y Georgia, 
South Carohna, Missouri, Mississippi, 
Louisiana, and Alabama.^ 

Reasons which in great part influenced all 
the Southern States thus rejecting the propo- 
sition may be gathered from the following 
words of Governor Wilson, of South Caro- 
lina, in submitting the resolutions: "A firm 
determination to resist, at the threshold, 
every invasion of our domestic tranquillity, 
and to preserve our sovereignty and indepen- 
dence as a State, is earnestly recommended."^ 

The resolutions required of the Southern 
States a complete surrender in this regard 
of their reserved rights; they feared what 
Governor Wilson called " the overwhelming 
powers of the general government," and 
were unwilling to make the admission re- 
quired, that the slavery in the South was a 
question for the nation. 

Another reason was that, although there 
was a quite common desire in the Southern 
States to get rid of slavery, the majority 
sentiment doubtless was not yet ready for 
the step. 

Basing this plan on the "consent of the 

* Ames, p. 203. - lb., p. 206. 

43 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

slave-holding States," as the Ohio legisla- 
ture did, was an acknowledgment that the 
North had no power over the matter; while 
the proposition to share in the expense of 
transporting the negroes, after they were 
manumitted, seems to be a recognition of 
the joint responsibility of both sections for 
the existence of slavery in the South. How- 
ever that may be, the generous concurrence 
of nine of the thirteen Northern States in- 
dicates how kindly the temper of the North 
toward the South was before the rise of the 
*' New Abolitionism "in 1 83 1 . Had emanci- 
pation been, under the Federal Constitu- 
tion, a national and not a local question, 
it is possible that slavery might have been 
abolished in America, as it was in the mother 
country, peacefully and with compensation 
to owners. 

The Ohio idea of freeing and at the same 
time colonizing the slaves, was no doubt 
suggested by the scheme of the African 
Colonization Society. This Colonization 
Society grew out of a resolution passed by 
the General Assembly of Virginia, Decem- 
ber 23, 1816. Its purpose was to rid the 
country of such free negroes and subse- 

44 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

quently manumitted slaves as should be 
willing to go to Liberia, where a home was se- 
cured for them, and a government set up that 
was to be eventually controlled by the negro 
from America. The plan was endorsed by 
Georgia in 1817, Maryland in 1818, Tenn- 
essee in 1818, and Vermont in 1819.^ 

The Colonization Society was composed 
of Southern and Northern philanthropists 
and statesmen of the most exalted char- 
acter. Among its presidents were, at times, 
President Monroe and ex-President Madi- 
son. Chief Justice Marshall was one of 
its presidents. Colonization, while relieving 
America, was also to give the negro an 
opportunity for self-government and self- 
development in his native country, aided at 
the outset by experienced white men, and 
Abraham Lincoln, when he was eulogizing 
the dead Henry Clay, one of the eloquent 
advocates of the scheme, seemed to be in 
love with the idea of restoring the poor 
African to that land from which he had 
been rudely snatched by the rapacious white 
man. The society, with much aid from phi- 
lanthropists and some from the Federal Gov- 

'Ames, 195, 

45 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

ernment, was making progress when, from 
183 1 to 1835, the Abolitionists halted it/ 
They got the ears of the negro and per- 
suaded him not to go to Liberia. Its friends 
thought the enterprise would stimulate 
emancipation by furnishing a home for such 
negroes as their owners were willing to 
manumit; but the new friends of the negro 
told him it was a trick of the slave-holder, 
and intended to perpetuate slavery — it was 
banishment. And Dr. Hart now, in his 
"Abolition and Slavery," calls it a move 
for the "expatriation of the negro." 

All together only a few thousand negroes 
went to Liberia. The enterprise lagged, 
and finally failed, partly because of opposi- 
tion, but chiefly because the negroes were 
slothful and incapable of self-government. 
The word came back that they were not 
prospering. For a time, while white men 
were helping them in their government, the 
outlook for Liberia had more or less prom- 
ise in it. When the whites, to give the ne- 
groes their opportunity for self-develop- 
ment withdrew their case was hopeless.^ 

* See Garrison's "Garrison." 
_ ^ ' See article in Indepejident, 1906, Miss Mahony. 

46 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

In 1828, while emancipation was still 
being freely canvassed North and South, 
Benjamin Lundy, an Abolition editor in 
charge of The Genius of Emancipation, 
then being published at Baltimore, in a 
slave State, went to Boston to "stir up'* 
the Northern people " to the work of abol- 
ishing slavery in the South." Dr. Chan- 
ning, who has been previously quoted, 
wrote a letter to Daniel Webster on the 
28th of May, 1828, in which, after reciting 
the purpose of Lundy, and saying that he 
was "aware how cautiously exertions are to 
be made for it in this part of the country," 
it being a local question, he said: "It seems 
to me that, before moving in this matter, we 
ought to say to them (our Southern breth- 
ren) distinctly, *We consider slavery as your 
calamity, not your crime, and we will share 
with you the burden of putting an end to it. 
We will consent that the public lands shall 
be appropriated to this object; or that the 
general government shall be clothed with the 
power to apply a portion of revenue to it.'' 

" I throw out these suggestions merely to 
illustrate my views. We must first let the 
Southern States see that we are their 
47 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

friends in this affair; that we sympathize 
with them and, from principles of patriotism 
and philanthropy, are willing to share the 
toil and expense of abohshing slavery, or, I 
fear, our interference will avail nothing." ^ 
Mr. Webster never gave out this letter until 
February 15, 185 1.- 

In less than three years after that letter 
was written, Lundy's friend, William Lloyd 
Garrison, started in Boston a crusade 
against slavery in the South, on the ground 
that instead of being the ''calamity,'' as 
Dr. Channing deemed it to be, it was the 
''crime'' of the South. Had no such ex- 
asperating sectional cry as this ever been 
raised, the story told in this little book would 
have been very different from that which is 
to follow. Even Spain, the laggard of na- 
tions, since that day has abolished slavery 
in her colonies. Brazil long ago fell into 
line, and it is impossible for one not blinded 
by the sectional strife of the past, now to 
conceive that the Southern States of this 
Union, whose people in 1830 were among 
the foremost of the world in all the elements 

'"Webster's Works," vol. V, pp. 366-67, 1851. 
^Ib., ed. 1851, vol. V, pp. 266-67. 

48 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

of Christian civilization, would not long, 
long ago, if left to themselves, have found 
some means by which to rid themselves of 
an institution condemned by the public 
sentiment of the world and even then de- 
plored by the Southerners themselves. 

The crime, if crime it was, of slavery in 
the South in 1830 was one for which the two 
sections of the Union were equally to blame. 
Abraham Lincoln said in his debate with 
Douglas at Peoria, Illinois, October 15, 
1858: "When Southern people tell us they 
are no more responsible for slavery than 
we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it 
is said that the institution exists, and that 
it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any sat- 
isfactory way, I can understand and appre- 
ciate the saying. I surely do not blame 
them for not doing what I would not know 
how to do myself." * 

Prior to the rise of the Abolitionists in 
183 1, emancipationists South had been free 
to grapple with conditions as they found 
them. What they and what the people of 
the North had accomplished we may gather 
from the United States census reports. The 

' "The Negro Problem," Pickett, 1809. 
49 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

tables following are taken from "Larned's 
History of Ready Reference," vol. V. The 
classifications are his. We have numbered 
three of his tables, for the sake of reference, 
and have added columns 4 and 5, calculated 
from Larned's figures, to show *' excess of 
free blacks" and ''increase of free blacks. 
South. 

Let the reader assume as a fact, which 
will perhaps not be questioned, that "free 
blacks" in the census means freedmen and 
their increase, and these tables tell their own 
story, a story to which must be added the 
statement that slaves in the South had been 
freed only by voluntary sacrifices of owners. 

It will be noted that in 1790 the total 
"blacks" in the North was 67,479, ^^id, 
although emancipation in these States had 
begun some years before, the excess of 
"free blacks" in the South was over 5,000. 
Also that at every succeeding census, down 
to and including that of 1830, the "excess 
of free blacks" increased with considerable 
regularity until 1830, when that excess is 

44,547- 

There was always in the South, prior to 

1 83 1, an active and freely expressed eman- 

50 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 



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/ 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

cipation sentiment. But there was not 
enough of it to influence legislation. In all 
but three or four of these States, emancipa- 
tion was made difficult by laws which, 
among other conditions, required that slaves 
after being freed should leave the State. 

Emancipation in the North had not been 
completed in 1830. Professor Ingram, pres- 
ident of the Royal Irish Academy, says in 
his "History of Slavery," London, 1895, 
p. 184: "The Northern States — beginning 
with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New 
Jersey in 1804 — either abolished slavery 
or adopted measures to effect its gradual 
abolition within their boundaries. But the 
principal operation of (at least) the latter 
change was to transfer Northern slaves to 
Southern markets." 
/ There had been in 1820 an angry dis- 
cussion in Congress about the admission 
of Missouri — with or without slavery — 
which was finally settled by the Missouri 
Compromise. This dispute over the ad- 
mission of Missouri is often said to have 
been the beginning of the sectional quarrel 
that finally ended in secession; but the con- 
troversy over Missouri and that begun by 
52 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

the "New Abolitionists" in 183 1 were en- 
tirely distinct. They were conducted on 
different plans. 

In the Missouri controversy the only 
questions were as to the expediency and 
constitutionality of denying to a new State 
the right to enter the Union, with or with- 
out slavery, as she might choose. The en- 
tire dispute was settled to the satisfaction 
of both sections by an agreement that 
States thereafter, south of 36° 30', might 
enter the Union with or without slavery; 
and nobody denied^ during all that discussion 
about Missouri^ or at any time previous to 
183 1, that every citizen was bound to maintain 
the Constitution and all laws passed in pur- 
suance of ity including the fugitive slave law. 

"The North submitted at that time 
(1828) to the obligations imposed upon it 
by the fugitive slave-catching clause of the 
Constitution and the fugitive slave law of 
1793-"^ So say the biographers of William 
Lloyd Garrison for the purpose of estab- 
lishing, as they afterwards do, their claim 
that Garrison conducted a successful revolt 
against that provision of the Constitution. 

'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. I, p. 113. 

53 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

What strengthens the statement that the 
North in 1828 submitted without protest 
to the "fugitive slave-catching clause of the 
Constitution," is that the Compromise Act 
of 1820 contained a provision extending the 
fugitive slave law over the territory made 
free by the act, while it should continue 
to be territory, and until there should be 
formed from it States, to which the existing 
law would automatically apply. Every 
subsequent nullification of the fugitive slave 
laws of the United States, whether by gov- 
ernors or state legislatures, was therefore a 
palpable violation of a provision that was of 
the essence of the Alissouri Compromise. 

The South was content with the Missouri 
Compromise, and from that date, 1820, until 
the rise of the "New Abolitionists," slavery 
was in all that region an open question. 
Judge Temple says in his "Covenanter, 
Cavalier, and Puritan," p. 208: "In 1826, of 
the 143 emancipation societies in the United 
States, 103 were in the South." 

The questions for Southern emancipa- 
tionists were : How could the slaves be freed, 
and in what time.^ How about compensa- 
tion to owners.^ Where could the freed 
54 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

slaves be sent, and how? And, if deporta- 
tion should prove impossible, what system 
could be devised whereby the two races 
could dwell together peacefully? These 
were indeed serious problems, and required 
time and grave consideration. 

"Who can doubt," says Mr. Curtis, to 
quote once more his "Life of Buchanan," 
"that all such questions could have been 
satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity 
of the South had been left to its own time ^^ 
and mode of answering them, and without 
any external force but the force of kindly, 
respectful consideration and forebearing 
Christian fellowship?" ^ 

But this was not to be. 

1 George Ticknor Curtis's "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283. 



55 



CHAPTER III 
THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS 

ON the first day of January, 183 1, there 
came out in Boston a new paper, The 
Liberator^ WiUiam Lloyd Garrison, editor. 
That was the beginning, historians now gen- 
erally agree, of "New Abolitionism." The 
editor of the new paper was the founder of 
the new sect. 

Benjamin Lundy was a predecessor of 
Garrison, on much the same lines as those 
pursued by the latter. Lundy had previously 
formed many Abolition societies. The Phi- 
lanthropist of March, 1828, estimated the 
number of anti-slavery societies as "up- 
wards of 130, and most of them in the slave 
States, and of Lundy's formation, among 
the Quakers." * But Garrison became the 
leader and Lundy the disciple. 

Garrison was a man of pleasing personal 
appearance, abstemious in habits, and of re- 
markable energy and will power. He was a 

'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. I. 
56 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

vigorous and forceful writer. Denunciation 
was his chief weapon, and he had "a genius 
for infuriating his antagonists." The follow- 
ing is a fair specimen of his style. Speaking 
of himself and his fellow-workers as the 
"soldiers of God," he said: "Their feet are 
shod with the preparation of the gospel of 
peace. . . . Hence, when smitten on one 
cheek they turn the other also, being de- 
famed they entreat, being reviled they 
bless," etc. And on that same page,' and in 
the same prospectus, showing how he 
"blesses" those who, as he understands, are 
outside of the "Kingdom of God," he says: 
"All without are dogs and sorcerers, and 
. . . and murderers, and idolaters, and 
whatsoever loveth a lie." 

Mr. Garrison had no perspective, no 
sense of relation or proportion. In his eye 
the most humane slave-holder was a wicked 
monster. He had a genius for organiza- 
tion, and a year after the first issue of 
The Liberator he and his little body of 
brother fanatics had grown into the New 
England Anti-Slavery Society. 

The new sect called themselves for a time 

» lb., vol. II, p. 202. 

57 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the " New Abolitionists," because their doc- 
trines were new. The principles upon which 
this organization was to be based were not 
all formulated at once. The key-note was 
sounded in Garrison's "Address to the Pub- 
lic" in the first number of The Liberator: 

I shall strenuously contend for the immediate en- 
franchisement of our slave population. I shall be 
as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice 
on this subject. / do not wish to think or speak or 
write with moderation. 

In an earlier issue, after denouncing sla- 
very as a "damning crime," the editor said: 
"Therefore my efforts shall be directed to 
the exposure of those who practise it.'' 

The substance of Garrison's teachings 
was that slavery, anywhere in the United 
States, was the concern of all, and that it 
was to be put down by making not only 
slavery but also the slave-holder odious. 
And, further, it was the slave, not the 
slave-owner, who was entitled to compen- 
sation. 

Thus the distinctive features of the new 
crusade were to be warfare upon the personal 
character of every slave-holder and the con- 

58 



V. 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

fiscation of his property. It was, too, the 
beginning of that sectional war by people of 
the North against the existence of slavery 
in the South, which, as we have seen, was 
deprecated by Dr. Channing in his letter 
three years before to Mr. Webster. 

The new sect began by assailing slavery 
in States other than their own, and very 
soon they were openly denouncing the Con- 
stitution of their country because under it 
slavery in those sections was none of their 
business; and of course they repudiated 
the Missouri Compromise absolutely, the 
essence of that compromise being that sla- 
very was the business of the States in which 
it existed. 

It was a part of their scheme to send cir- 
culars depicting the evils of slavery broad- 
cast through the South; and they were sent 
especially to the free negroes of that section. 

'*In 1820," says Dr. Hart in his "Slavery 
and Abolition," "at Charleston (South Car- 
olina), E)enmark Vesey, a free negro, made 
an elaborate plot to rise, massacre the white 
population, seize the shipping in the harbor, 
and, if hard pressed, to sail away to the West 
Indies. One of the negroes gave evidence, 

59 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

Vesey was seized, duly tried, and with 
thirty-four others was hanged." * 

This plot, so nearly successful, was fresh 
in the minds of Southerners when the Abo- 
litionists began their programme, and natu- 
rally, the South at once took the alarm — an 
alarm that was increased by the massacre, 
in the Nat Turner insurrection, of sixty-one 
men, women, and children, which took place 
in Virginia seven months after the first issue 
of The Liberator. One of Turner's lieutenants 
is stated to have been a free negro. This 
insurrection the South attributed to The 
Liberator. Professor Hart says a free negro 
named Walker had previously sent out to 
the South, from Boston, a pamphlet, "the 
tone of which was unmistakable," and that 
"this pamphlet is known to have reached 
Virginia, and may possibly have influenced 
the Nat Turner insurrection,"^ 

If this surmise be correct, knowledge that 
Walker, a free negro, had been responsible 
for the Turner insurrection, would have 
lessened neither the guilt of the Abolition- 
ists nor the fears of the Southerners. 

But in 1832 Abolition agitation and the 

' Hart's "Slaver}' and Abolition," p. 163. - lb., pp. 217-20. 

60 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

fears of insurrection had not as yet entirely 
stifled the discussion of slavery in the South. 
A debate on slavery took place that year in 
the Virginia Assembly, the immediate cause 
of which was no doubt the Turner insurrec- 
tion. The members of that body had not 
been elected on any issue of that character. 
The discussion thus precipitated shows, 
therefore, the state of public opinion in 
Virginia on slavery. Of this debate a dis- 
tinguished Northern writer says:^ 

"In the year 1832 there was, nowhere in 
the world, a more enlightened sense of the 
wrong and evil of slavery than there was 
among the public men and people of Vir- 
ginia." 

In the Assembly of that year Mr. Ran- 
dolph brought forward a bill to acco??iplisk 
gradual emancipation. Mr. Curtis continues: 

"No member of the House defended slav- 
ery. . . . There could be nothing said any- 
where, there had been nothing said out of 
Virginia, stronger and truer in deprecating 
the evils of slavery, than was said in that 
discussion, by Virginia gentlemen, debating 

i"Life of James Buchanan," George Ticknor Curtis, vol. II, 
pp. 277-78. 

61 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

in their own legislature, a matter that con- 
cerned themselves and their people." 

The bill was not pressed to a vote, but 
the House, by a vote of 65 to 38, declared 
"that they were profoundly sensible of the 
great evils arising from the condition of the 
colored population of the Commonwealth 
and were induced by policy, as well as 
humanity, to attempt the immediate re- 
moval of the free negroes; but that further 
action for the removal of the slaves should 
await a more definite development of public 
opinion.''^ 

Mr. Randolph, who was from the large 
slave-holding county of Albemarle, was re- 
elected to the next assembly. 

But when the early summer of 1835 had 
come the fear of insurrection had created 
such wide-spread terror throughout the 
whole South that every emancipation so- 
ciety in that region had long since closed 
its doors; and now the Abolitionists were 
sending South their circulars in numbers. 
Many were sent to Charleston, South 
Carolina,^ where fifteen years before " the 

* Referred to in " Life of Andrew Jackson," W. G. Sumner, 
p. 350. "Hart, iupra. 

62 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

free negro, Denmark Vesey, had laid the 
plot to massacre the whites, that had been 
discovered just in time to prevent its con- 
summation. 

The President, Andrew Jackson, in his 
next message to Congress, December, 1835, 
called their "attention to the painful excite- 
ment produced in the South by attempts to 
circulate through the mails inflammatory ap- 
peals addressed to the passions of the slaves, 
in prints and in various sorts of publications 
calculated to stimulate them to insurrection 
and produce all the horrors of a servile warT 

The good people of Boston were now 
thoroughly aroused. They had from the 
first frowned on the Abolition movement. 
Garrison was complaining that in all the 
city his society could not "hire a hall or a 
meeting-house." The Abolition idea had 
been for a time thought chimerical and 
therefore negligible. Later, civic, business, 
social, and religious organizations had all of 
them in their several spheres been earnest 
and active in their opposition; now it 
seemed to be time for concerted action. 

In Garrison's "Garrison" (vol. I, p. 495), 
we read that "the social, political, religious 

63 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

a7id intellectual elite of Boston filled Fan- 
euil Hall on the afternoon of Friday, Au- 
gust 3, 1835, to frame an indictment against 
their fellow-citizens." 

This "indictment" the Boston Transcript 
reported as follows: 

Resolved, That the people of the United States by 
the Constitution under which, by the Divine bless- 
ing, they hold their most valuable political privi- 
leges, have solemnly agreed with each other to 
leave to their respective States the jurisdiction per- 
taining to the relation of master and slave within 
their boundaries, and that no man or body of men, 
except the people of the governments of those States, 
can of right do any act to dissolve or impair the 
obligations of that contract. 

Resolved, That we hold in reprobation all attempts, 
in whatever guise they may appear, to coerce any 
of the United States to abolish slavery by appeals 
to the terror of the master or the passions of the slave. 

Resolved, That we disapprove of all associations 
instituted in the non-slave-holding States with the 
intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on 
the subject of slavery in those States without their 
consent. For the purpose of securing freedom of 
individual thought they are needless — and they af- 
ford to those persons in the Southern States, whose 
object is to effect a dissolution of the Union (if any 
such there may be now or hereafter), a pretext for 
the furtherance of their schemes. 

64 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Resolved, That all measures adopted, the natural 
and direct tendency of which is to excite the slaves of 
the South to revolt, or of spreading among them a spirit 
of insubordination, are repugnant to the duties of 
the man and the citizen, and that where such meas- 
ures become manifest by overt acts, which are rec- 
ognizable by constitutional laws, we will aid by all 
means in our power in the support of those laws. 

Resolved, That while we recommend to others the 
duty of sacrificing their opinions, passions and sym- 
pathies upon the altar of the laws, we are bound to 
show that a regard to the supremacy of those laws 
is the rule of our conduct — and consequently to 
deprecate all tumultuous assemblies, all riotous or 
violent proceedings, all outrages on person and prop- 
erty, and all illegal notions of the right or duty of 
executing summary and vindictive justice in any 
mode unsanctioned by law. 

The allusion in the last resolution is to a 
then recent lynching of negroes in Missis- 
sippi charged with insurrection. 

In speaking to these resolutions, Harrison 
Gray Otis, a great conservative leader, de- 
nounced the Abolition agitators, accusing 
them of "wishing to 'scatter among our 
Southern brethren firebrands, arrows, and 
death,' and of attempting to force Aboli- 
tion by appeals to the terror of the mas- 
ters and the passions of the slaves," and 

6S 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

decrying their "measures, the natural and 
direct tendency of which is to excite the 
slaves of the South to revolt," etc. 

Another of the speakers, ex-Senator Peleg 
Sprague, said (p. 496, Garrison's "Garri- 
son") that "if their sentiments prevailed 
it would be all over with the Union, which 
would give place to two hostile confeder- 
acies, with forts and standing armies." 

These resolutions and speeches, viewed in 
the light of what followed, read now like 
prophecy. 

It is a familiar rule of law that a contem- 
poraneous exposition of a statute is to be 
given extraordinary weight by the courts, 
the reason being that the judge then sitting 
knows the surrounding circumstances. That 
Boston meeting pronounced the deliberate 
judgment of the most intelligent men of 
Boston on the situation, as they knew it to 
be that day; it was in their midst that The 
Liberator was being published ; there the new 
sect had its head-quarters, and there it was 
doing its work. 

Quite as strong as the evidence furnished 
by that great Faneuil Hall meeting is the 
testimony of the churches. 
66 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

The churches and rehgious bodies in 
America had heartily favored the general 
anti-slavery movement that was sweeping 
over all America between 1770 and 1831, 
while it was proceeding in an orderly manner 
and with due regard to law. 

In 181 2 the Methodist General Confer- 
ence voted that no slave-holder could con- 
tinue as a local elder. The Presbyterian 
General Assembly in 18 18 unanimously re- 
solved that "slavery was a gross violation 
of the most precious and moral rights of 
human nature," etc. 

These bodies represented both the North 
and the South, and this paragraph shows 
what was, and continued to be, the general 
attitude of American churches until after 
the Abolitionists had begun their assault 
on both slavery in the South and the Con- 
stitution of the United States, which pro- 
tected it. Then, in view of the awful social 
and political cataclysm that seemed to be 
threatened, there occurred a stupendous 
change. We learn from Hart that Garri- 
son "soon found that neither minister 7ior 
church anywhere in the lower South continued 
(as before) to protest against slavery; that 
67 



i^ 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the cloth in the North was arrayed against 
him; and that many Northern divines 
vigorously opposed him." Also that Moses 
Stuart, professor of Hebrew in Andover 
Theological Seminary; President Lord, of 
Dartmouth College, and Hopkins, the Epis- 
copal bishop of Vermont, now became de- 
fenders of slavery. ''The positive opposi- 
tion of churches soon followed." 

And then we have cited, condemnations 
of Abolitionism by the Methodist Confer- 
ence of 1836, by the New York Methodist 
Conference of 1838, by the American Board 
of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by 
the American Home Missionary Society, 
the American Bible Society, the Protestant 
Episcopal Church, and the Baptists. See 
for these statements. Hart, pp. 211-12. 

The import of all this is unmistakable; 
and this "about-face" of religious organiza- 
tions on the question of the morality of 
slavery has no parallel in all the history of 
Christian churches. Its significance cannot 
be overstated. It took place North and 
South. It meant opposition to a movement 
that was outside the church and with which 
religion could have no concern, except in so 
68 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

far as it was a vital assault upon the State, and 
the -peace of the State. To make their oppo- 
sition effective the Christians of that day 
did this remarkable thing. They reversed 
their religious views on slavery, which the 
Abolitionists were now assailing, and which 
they themselves had previously opposed. They 
re-examined their Bibles and found argu- 
ments that favored slavery. These argu- 
ments they used in an attempt to stem an 
agitation that, as they saw it, was arraying 
section against section and threatening the 
perpetuity of the Union. 

United testimony from all these Christian 
bodies is more conclusive contemporaneous 
evidence against the agitators and their 
methods than even the proceedings of all 
conservative Boston at Faneuil Hall in 
August, 1835. 

This new attitude of the church toward 
slavery meant perhaps also something fur- 
ther — it meant that slavery, as it actually 
existed, was not then as horrible to North- 
erners, who could go across the line and see 
it, which many of them did, as it is now to 
those whose ideas of it come chiefly from 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
69 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

In view of this phenomenal movement of 
Northern Christians it is not strange that 
Southern churches adhered, throughout the 
deadly struggle that was now on, to the po- 
sition into which they had been driven — that 
slavery was sanctioned by the Bible — nor 
is it matter of wonder that, as Professor 
Hart makes prominent on p. 137, "not 
a single Southern man of large reputation 
and influence failed to stand by slavery." 

Historians of to-day usually narrate with- 
out comment that nearly all the American 
churches and divines at first opposed the 
Abolitionists. It illustrates the courage 
with which the Abolitionists stood, as Dr. 
Hart delights to point out, "for a despised 
cause." They assuredly did stand by their 
guns. 

Later, another change came about in the 
attitude of the churches. In 1844 the Abo- 
litionists were to achieve their first victory 
in the great religious world. The Methodist 
Church was then disrupted, "squarely on 
the question whether a bishop could own 
slaves, and all the Southern members with- 
drew and organized the Methodist Episco- 
pal Church, South." Professor Hart, p. 214, 
70 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

says of this: "Clearly, the impassioned 
agitation of the Abolitionists had made it 
impossible for a great number of Northern 
anti-slavery men to remain on terms oj 
friendship with their Southern brethren.^* 

That great Faneuil Hall meeting of Au- 
gust 31, 1835, was followed some weeks later 
by a lamentable anti-Garrison mob, which 
did not stand alone. In the years 1835, 
1836, and 1837 a great wave of anti-Aboli- 
tion excitement swept over the North. In 
New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton 
(Illinois), and many other places, there were 
anti-Abolition riots, sometimes resulting in 
arson and bloodshed. 

The heart of the great, peace-loving, 
patriotic, and theretofore happy and con- 
tented North, was at that time stirred 
with the profoundest indignation against the 
Abolitionists. Northern opinion then was 
that the Abolitionists, by their unpatriotic 
course and their nefarious methods, were 
driving the South to desperation and en- 
dangering the Union. If the North at that 
time saw the situation as it really was, the 
historian of the present day should say so. 
If, on the other hand, the people of both 

71 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the North and South were then laboring 
under delusions, as to the facts that were 
occurring among them, those of this gener- 
ation, who are wiser than their ancestors, 
should give us the sources of their informa- 
tion. To know the lessons of history we 
must have the facts/ 

In 1854, at Framingham, Massachusetts, 
the Abolitionists celebrated the Fourth of 
July thus: Their leader, William Lloyd 
Garrison, held up and burned to ashes, be- 
fore the applauding multitude, one after 
another, copies of 

I St. The fugitive slave law. 

2d. The decision of Commissioner Loring 
in the case of Burns, a fugitive slave. 

' The late Professor William Graham Sumner, of Yale, in his 
"Life of Andrew Jackson," 1888, treats of the excitement at 
Charleston, South Carolina, in 1835, during Jackson's adminis- 
tration, over Abolition circulars, etc. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, 
Professor of History at Harvard, in his "Abolition and Slavery," 
1906, treats of the same subject. The following extracts from 
these books will show how these authors picture that exciting pe- 
riod, and our italics will emphasize the sang-froid with which they 
touch off what so profoundly affected public sentiment, both North 
and South, whe7i the events were occurrhig. Professor Sumner has 
this to say: 

"The Abolition Society adopted the policy of sending docu- 
ments, papers, and pictures against slavery to the Southern 
States. 

// the intention was, as charged, to excite the slaves to revolt, 
the device, as it seems to us now, must have fallen short of its ob- 

72 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

3d. The charge to the Grand Jury of 
Judge Benjamin R. Curtis in reference to 
the effort of a mob to secure a fugitive slave. 

4th. "Then, holding up the United States 
Constitution, he branded it as the source 
and parent of all other atrocities, 'a cove- 
nant with death and an agreement with 
hell,' and consumed it to ashes on the spot, 
exclaiming, 'So perish all compromises with 
tyranny ! And let all the people say. Amen ! ' 
A tremendous shout of 'Amen!' went up to 
heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled 
with a few hisses and wrathful exclamations 

ject, for the chance that anything could get into the hands of 
the black man 7nust have been poor indeed. 

"These publications, however, caused a panic and a wild indig- 
nation in the South." — Sumner's "Jackson," p. 350. 

Why should the Southerners of that day go wild over conduct 
for which the professor of this era has no word of condemnation ? 

Dr. Hart follows Professor Sumner's treatment. These are his 
words : 

"The free negroes of the South, the Abolitionists could not 
reach except by mailing publications to them, a process which 
fearfully exasperated the South without reaching the persons ad- 
dressed" — Hart's "Abolition and Slavery," p. 216. 

Why should Southerners be "fearful" when they were inter- 
cepting all the dangerous circulars, etc., they could find.^ And 
why should they be exasperated at all.'' 

Dr. Hart's chair at Harvard is within gunshot of Faneuil Hall, 
yet the great meeting there of August 31, 1835, is not mentioned 
in either his or Professor Sumner's book, nor is there to be found 
in either of them any explanation of the reasons underlying the gen- 
eral and emphatic condemnation throughout the North at that period 
of the Abolitionists and their methods, 

73 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

from some, who evidently were in a rowdy- 
ish state of mind, but who were at once 
cowed by the popular feeling." ^ 

The Abolitionist movement was radical; 
it was revolutionary. When an accredited 
teacher of history, in one of the greatest of 
our universities, writes a volume on "Abo- 
lition and Slavery," why should he restrict 
himself in comment, as Dr. Hart thus does 
in his preface? The book is "intended to 
show that there was more than one side to 
the controversy, and that both the milder 
form of opposition called anti-slavery and 
the extreme form called Abolition, wtrt coji- 
fronted by practical difficulties which to many 
public men seemed insurmountable." 

Why should not the historian, in addition 
to pointing out the "difficulties" encoun- 
tered by these extremists, show how and 
why the people of that day condemned their 
condzict? 
/ Condonation of the Abolitionists, and a 
proper regard for the Constitution of the 
United States, cannot be taught to the 
youth of America at one and the same 
/ time. 

* Garrison's "Garrison," vol. Ill, p. 412. 

74 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

The writer has been unable to find any of 
the incendiary pamphlets that had proved 
so inflammatory. He has, however, before 
him a little anonymous publication entitled 
''Slavery Illustrated in its Effects upon 
Woman," Isaac Knapp, Boston, 1837. It 
was for circulation in the North, being 
''Affectionately Inscribed to all the Mem- 
bers of Female Anti-Slavery Societies," and 
it is only cited here as an illustration of the 
almost inconceivable venom with which the 
crusade was carried on to embitter the North 
against the South. It is a vicious attack 
upon the morality of Southern men and 
women, and upon Southern churches. None 
of its charges does it claim to authenticate, 
and it gives no names or dates. One inci- 
dent, related as typical, is of two white 
women, all the time in full communion with 
their church, under pretence of a boarding- 
house, keeping a brothel, negro women be- 
ing the inmates. 

In the chapter entitled "Impurity of the 
Christian Churches" is this sentence: "At 
present the Southern Churches are only 
one vast consociation of hypocrites and 
sinners." 

75 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

The booklet was published anonymously, 
but at that time any prurient story about 
slavery in the South would circulate, no 
matter whether vouched for or not. 



76 



CHAPTER IV 
FEELING IN THE SOUTH— 1835 

NOT stronger than the proceedings of a 
great non-partisan pubUc meeting, or 
than the action of religious bodies, but go- 
ing more into detail as to public opinion in 
the South and the effect upon it of Abohtion 
agitation, is the evidence of a quiet observer, 
Professor E. A. Andrews, who, in July, 1835, 
had been sent out as the agent of "The Bos- 
ton Union for the Relief and Improvement 
of the Colored Race." His reports from both 
Northern and Southern States, consisting 
of letters from various points, constitute a 
book, *' Slavery and the Domestic Slave 
Trade," Boston, 1836. 

July 17, 1835, from Baltimore, Professor 
Andrews reports that a resident clergyman, 
who appears to have his entire confidence, 
says, among other things, ''that a disposi- 
tion to emancipate their slaves is very preva- 
lent among the slave-holders of this State, 
could they see any way to do so consistently 
77 



i< 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

with the true interest of the slave, but that 
it is their universal belief that no means of 
doing this is now presented except that of 
colonizing them in Africa." 

From the same city, July 17, 1835, he 
writes, p. 53: "In this city there appears 
to be no strong attachment to slavery and 
no wish to perpetuate it." 

Again, on p. 95: "There is but one sen- 
timent amongst those with whom I have 
conversed in this city, respecting the possi- 
bility of the white and colored races living 
peaceably together in freedom, nor during 
my residence at the South and my subse- 
quent intercourse with the Southern people, 
did I ever meet with one who believed it possible 
for the two races to continue together after 
emancipation. . . . When the slaves of the 
South are liberated they form an integral 
part of the population of the country, and 
must influence its destiny for ages — perhaps 
forever." 

From Fredericksburg, Virginia, Professor 
Andrews writes: 

Since I entered the slave-holding country I have 
seen but one man who did not deprecate wholly 
and absolutely the direct interference of Northern 

78 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Abolitionists with the institutions of the South. "I 
was an Abolitionist," has been the language of num- 
bers of those with whom I have conversed; "I was 
an Abolitionist, and was laboring earnestly to bring 
about a prospective system of emancipatiofi. I even 
saw, as I believed, the certain and complete success of 
the friends of the colored race at no distant period, when 
these Northern Abolitionists interfered, and by their 
extravagant and impracticable schemes frustrated all 
our hopes. . . . Our people have become exasperated, 
the friends of the slaves alarmed, etc,^ . . . Equally 
united are they in the opinion that the servitude of 
the slaves is far more rigorous now than it would have 
been had there been no interference with them. In 
proportion to the danger of revolt and insurrection, have 
been the severity of the enactments for controlling 
them and the diligence with which the laws have been 
executed." 

From a private letter, written at Green- 
ville, Alabama, August 30, 1835, by a dis- 
tinguished lawyer, John W. Womack, to 
his brother, we quote: 

The anti-slavery societies in the Northern and 
Middle States are doing all they can to destroy our 
domestic harmony by sending among us pamphlets, 
tracts, and newspapers — for the purpose of exciting 
dissatisfaction and insurrection among our slaves. 
. . . Meetings have been held in Mobile, in Mont- 

' " Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade," Andrews, pp. 
156-57- 

79 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

gomery, in Greensboro, and in Tuscaloosa, and in 
different parts of all the Southern States. At these 
meetings resolutions have been adopted, disclaim- 
ing (sic) and denying the right of the Northern people 
to interfere in any manner in our internal domestic 
concerns. ... It is my solemn opinion that this 
question (to wit, slavery) will ultimately bring about 
a dissolution of the Union of the States. 

It should be remembered that in 1832 the 
massacre in Santo Domingo of all the whites 
by the blacks was fresh in mind. It had 
occurred in 18 14 — after manumission — and 
had produced, especially in the minds of 
statesmen and of all observers of the many 
signs of antagonism between the two races, 
a profound and lasting impression. 

The fear that the races, both free, could 
not live together was in the mind of Thomas 
Jefferson, of Henry Clay, and of every other 
Southern emancipationist. And deporta- 
tion, its expense, and the want of a home to 
which to send the negro — here was a stum- 
bling-block in the way of Southern emanci- 
pation. 

Indeed, the incompatibility of the races 

was an appalling thought in the minds of 

Southerners for the whole thirty years of 

anti-slavery agitation. It was even with 

80 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Abraham Lincoln, and weighed upon his 
mind when, at last, in 1862, mihtary neces- 
sity placed upon his shoulders the responsi- 
bility of emancipating the Southern slaves. 
Serious as was the responsibility, the ques- 
tion was not new to him. When Mr. Lin- 
coln said, in his celebrated Springfield speech 
in 1858, "I believe this government cannot 
endure permanently half slave and half 
free," and added that he did not expect the 
government to fail, he certainly expected 
that emancipation in the South was com- 
ing; and, of course, he thought over what 
the consequences might be. 

In that same debate with Douglas, in his 
speech at Charleston, Illinois, Mr. Lincoln 
said: "There is a physical difi^erence be- 
tween the white and black races, which, I 
believe, will forever forbid the tw^o races 
living together on terms of social and po- 
litical equality." 

In his memorial address on Henry Clay, 
in 1852, he had said: "If, as the friends of 
colonization hope, the present and coming 
generations of our countrymen shall by 
some means succeed in freeing our land from 
the dangerous presence of slavery, and at 
81 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the same time in restoring a captive people 
to their long lost father-land, ... it will, 
indeed, be a glorious consummation. And 
if to such a contribution the efforts of Mr. 
Clay shall have contributed . . . none of 
his labors will have been more valuable to 
his country and his kind." 

In his famous emancipation proclamation 
he promised "that the effort to colonize per- 
sons of African descent upon this continent 
or elsewhere, with the consent of the govern- 
ment existing there, will be continued." 

It must have been with a heavy heart that 
the great President announced the failure 
of all his efforts to find a home outside of 
America for the freedmen, when he informed 
Congress in his December inessage, 1862, that 
all in vain he had asked permission to send the 
negroes, when freed, to the British, the Danish, 
and the French West Indies; and that the 
Spanish-American countries in Central Amer- 
ica had also refused his request. He could 
find no places except Hayti and Liberia. 
He even made the futile experiment of send- 
ing a ship-load to a little island off Hayti. ^ 

* Within perhaps a year Mr. Lincoln was compelled to bring 
these negroes home; they were starving. 

82 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Hume, in "The Abolitionists," tells us that 
Mr. Lincohi for a time considered setting 
Texas apart as a home for the negroes — so 
much was he disturbed by this trouble. 



83 



CHAPTER V 
ANTI-ABOLITION AT THE NORTH 

SOUTHERNERS, save perhaps a few 
who were wise enough to foresee what 
the consequences might be, were deeply 
gratified when they read (183 5- 183 8) of 
the violent opposition in the North to the 
desperate schemes of the Abolitionists. 
Surely these mobs fairly represented public 
opinion, and that public opinion certainly 
was a strong guaranty to the South of fu- 
ture peace and security. 

But the Abolitionists themselves were not 
dismayed. They may have misread, indeed 
it is certain they did misunderstand, the 
signs of the times. Garrison in his Liber- 
ator took the ground — as do his children in 
their life of him, written fifty years later — 
that the great Faneuil Hall meeting of 
August 31, 1835, which they themselves 
declare represented *'the intelligence, the 
wealth, the culture, and the religion of 
Boston," was but an indication of the "pro- 
84 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

slavery" sentiment then existing. In reality 
it was just what it purported to be — an 
authoritative condemnation, not of the 
anti-slavery opinions, but of the avowed 
purposes and methods of the new sect. 
The mobbing of Garrison and the sacking 
of his printing office in Boston on Septem- 
ber 26th, however, and the lawless violence 
to Abolitionists that followed the denuncia- 
tions of that despised sect by speakers, and 
by the public press, in New York, in Phila- 
delphia, in Cincinnati, and elsewhere in the 
North, proved disastrous in the extreme. 

While that great wave of anti-Abolition 
feeling was sweeping over that whole region 
from East to West, there were many good 
people who deluded themselves with the 
idea that this new sect with its visionary 
and impracticable ideas was being consigned 
to oblivion, but in what followed we have a 
lesson that unfortunately some of our peo- 
ple have not yet fully learned. Mob law in 
any portion of our free country, where there 
is law with officers to enforce it, is a mis- 
take, a mistake that is likely to be followed 
sooner or later by most disastrous results. 
The mobs that marked the beginning of 

85 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

our Revolution in 1774 were legitimate; 
they meant revolt, revolt against constituted 
authorities. But where a mob does not 
mean the overthrow of government, where 
it only means to substitute its own blind 
will for the arm of the law, not good but 
evil — it may be long deferred, but evil event- 
ually — is sure to follow. When mobs as- 
sailed Abolitionists because they threatened 
the peace and tranquillity of the country, 
evil followed swiftly. 

Violent and harsh treatment of these mis- 
chievous agitators almost everywhere in the 
North, and the heroism with which they 
endured ignominy and insult, brought about 
a revulsion of public sentiment. To under- 
stand the philosophy of this, read two ex- 
tracts from the writings of that great, and 
universally admired, pulpit orator. Dr. 
William E. Channing of Boston, the first 
written sometime prior to that August 
meeting: 

The adoption of the common system of agitation 
by the Abolitionists has not been justified by suc- 
cess. From the beginning it has created alarm in 
the considerate, and strengthened the sympathies of 
the Free States with the slave-holder. It has made 

86 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

converts of a few individuals, but alienated multi- 
tudes. Its influence at the South has been almost 
wholly evil. It has stirred up bitter passions, and a 
fierce fanaticism, which have shut every ear and every 
heart against its arguments and persuasio7is. These 
efforts are more to be deplored, because the hope of 
freedom to the slave lies chiefly in the dispositions 
of his master. The Abolitionist proposed indeed 
to convert the slave-holder; and for this end he 
approached them with vituperation, and exhausted upon 
them the vocabulary of reproach. And he has reaped 
as he sowed. . . . Perhaps (though I am anxious to 
repel the thought) something has been lost to the 
cause of freedom and humanity.* 

These were Dr. Channing's opinions of 
the AboHtionists prior to August, 1835, and 
he seems to have kept silent for a time after 
the mobbing that followed that great Fan- 
euil Hall meeting; but a year later, when 
many other things had happened along the 
same line, he spoke out In an open letter to 
James G. BIrney, an Abolitionist editor who 
had been driven from Cincinnati, and whose 
press, on which The Philanthropist was 
printed, had been broken up. In that let- 
ter, p. 157, supra, speaking of course not 
for himself alone, Dr. Channing says: 

' " Channing's Works," vol. II, ed. 1S37, pp. 131-32. 
87 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

I think it best ... to extend my remarks to the 
spirit of violence and persecution which has broken 
out against the AboHtionists throughout the whole 
country. Of their merits and demerits as AboHtion- 
ists I have formerly spoken. ... I have expressed 
my fervent attachment to the great end to which 
they are pledged and at the same time my disappro- 
bation, to a certain extent, of their spirit and measures. 
. . . Deliberate, systematic efforts have been made, 
not here and there, but jar and wide, to wrest from its 
adherents that liberty of speech and the press, which 
our fathers asserted in blood, and which our Na- 
tional and State Governments are pledged to protect 
as our most sacred right. Its most conspicuous ad- 
vocates have been hunted and stoned, its meetings 
scattered, its presses broken up, and nothing but 
the patience, constancy and intrepidity of its mem- 
bers has saved it from extinction. . . . They are 
sufferers for the liberty of thought, speech and press; 
and in maintaining this liberty, aynidst i^isult and 
violence, they deserve a place among its honorable 
defenders. 

Still admitting that "their writings have 
been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, 
sweeping censure, and rash, injurious judg- 
ment," this great man now threw all the 
weight of his influence on the side of the 
Abolitionists, because they were the cham- 
pions of free speech. Their moral worth 

88 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

and steady adherence to their ideas of non- 
resistance he pointed to admiringly, and it 
must always be remembered to their credit 
that the private lives of Garrison and his 
leading co-workers were irreproachable. In- 
deed, the unselfish devotion of these agi- 
tators and their high moral character were 
in themselves a serious misfortune. They 
soon attracted a lot of zealots, male and 
female, who became as reckless as they were. 
And these out-and-out fanatics were not 
themselves office-seekers. What they feared, 
they said, was that a *'lot of soulless scamps 
would jump on to their shoulders to ride 
into office"; ^ and there really was the great 
danger, as appeared later. 

In the results that followed the mobbing 
of Abolitionists in the North, from 1834 to 
1836, is to be found another lesson for those 
voters of this day who can profit by the 
teachings of history. The violent assaults 
on the Abolitionists by the friends of the 
Constitution and the Union constituted an 
epoch in the lives of these people. It gave 
them a footing and a hearing and many 
converts. 

> Garrison's "Garrison," vol. Ill, p. 214. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

We have already noted some wonderful 
and instructive changes in the tide of events 
set in motion by the radical teachings of the 
New Abolitionists. The churches, as has 
been shown, to save the country. North and 
South, changed their attitude on slavery 
itself. Dr. Channing, who had opposed the 
methods of the Abolitionists, became, as 
many others did with him, when mobs had 
assailed these people, their defender and 
eulogist, because they were martyrs for the 
sake of free speech; and now we are to 
see in John Quincy Adams another change, 
equally notable, a change that was to make 
Mr. Adams thenceforward the most mo- 
mentous figure, at least during its earher 
stages, in the tragic drama that is the sub- 
ject of our story. 

Elected to the House of Representatives 
after the expiration of his term as President, 
Mr. Adams was not in sympathy with the 
methods of the Abolitionists. Indeed, prior 
to December 31, 183 1, he had shown as lit- 
tle interest in slavery as he did when on that 
day in presenting to the House fifteen peti- 
tions against slavery he "deprecated a dis- 
cussion which would lead to ill-will, to heart- 

90 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

burning, to mutual hatred . . . without 
accomphshing anything else."^ 

The petitions presented by Mr. Adams 
were referred to a committee. 

The Southerners had not then become 
so exasperated as to insist on Congress re- 
fusing to receive Abohtion petitions. But 
multiplying these petitions was a ready 
means of provoking the slave-holders, and 
soon petitions poured in from many quar- 
ters, couched, most of them, in language, 
not disrespectful to Congress but provoking 
to slave-holders. 

Unfortunately, the lower house of Con- 
gress on May 26, 1836, which was while 
mobs in the North were still trying to put 
down the Abolitionists, passed a resolution 
that all such petitions, etc., should there- 
after be laid upon the table, zvithont further. 
action. Adams voted against it as "a direct 
violation of the Constitution of the United 
States." The Constitution forbids any law 
"abridging the freedom of speech ... or 
the right ... to petition the government 
for a redress of grievances." The resolu- 
tion to lay all anti-slavery petitions on the 

' Hart's "Slavery and Abolition," p. 256. 
91 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

table without further action was passed, 
"with the hope that it might put a stop to 
the agitation that seemed to endanger the 
existence of the Union." But it had the 
opposite effect. It soon became known as 
the "gag resolution," and was, for years, the 
centre of the most aggravating discussions 
that had, up to that time, ever occurred in 
Congress. Mr. Adams in these debates be- 
came, without, it seems, ever having been 
in full sympathy with the agitators, thence- 
forward their champion in Congress, and so 
continued until the day of his death in 1848. 
The Abolitionists were happy. They were 
succeeding in their programme — making the 
Southern slave-holder odious by exasper- 
ating him into offending Northern senti- 
ment. 



92 



CHAPTER VI 

A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE 

IN 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, 
with a membership of over 200,000. 
Agitation had created all over the North a 
spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in 
the South, and especially to the admission 
of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 
the struggle over the application of Texas 
for admission into the Union had already, 
for three years, been mooted. Objections to 
the admission of the new State were many, 
such as: American adventurers had wrong- 
fully wrested control of the new State from 
Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; 
war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but 
chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, 
in the South, a strong reason for annexa- 
tion. There were, however, many sound 
and unanswerable arguments for the admis- 
sion of the new State, just such as had in- 
fluenced Jeff^erson in purchasing the Loui- 
93 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

siana territory: Texas was contiguous, her 
territory and resources immense. 

On the issue thus joined the first great 
gun had been fired by Dr. Channing, who, 
though still more moderate than some, might 
now be classed as an Abolitionist. August 
I, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry 
Clay against annexation, and in that letter 
he said: 

To me it seems not only the right but the duty of 
the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, 
to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this 
act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential 
conditions of the National Compact are violated." ^ 

This was very like the pronunciamento 
already made by Garrison — "no union with 
slavery." 

The underlying reasons that controlled 
Southern statesmen in this contest over 
Texas, and the motives that animated them 
in the fierce battles they fought later for 
new slave States, are thus stated by Mr. 
George Ticknor Curtis, of New England.^ 

It should in justice be remembered that the effort 

at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort 

1 "Channing's Works," vol. II, ed. 1847, p. 237. 
* "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 280. 

94 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

on the part of the So7ith, dictated by a desire to remain 
in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inher- 
ent incompatibility of a political union between slave- 
holding and non-slave-holding States. 

In 1840 the first effort for the annexation 
of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the 
Senate. 

If the Southerners had been as ready to 
accept the doctrine of an inherent incom- 
patibihty between slave and free States as 
were Dr. Channing and those other AboK- 
tionists who were now declaring for "no 
union with slave-holders," they would at 
once have seceded and joined Texas; but 
the South still loved the Union, and strove, 
down to i860, persistently, and often pas- 
sionately, for power that would enable it to 
remain safely in its folds. 

Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after 
annexation had been passed on by the peo- 
ple in the presidential election of 1844. In 
that election Clay was defeated by the 
AboUtionists. Because Clay was not unre- 
servedly against annexation the Abolition- 
ists drew from the Whigs in New York 
State enough votes, casting them for Bir- 
ney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and 
95 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

now Abolitionism was a factor in national 
politics. 

The two great national parties were the 
Democrats and the Whigs, the voters some- 
what equally divided between them. For 
years both parties had regarded the Aboli- 
tionists precisely as did the non-partisan 
meeting at Faneuil Hall, in August, 1835 — 
as a band of agitators, organized for the 
purpose of interfering with slavery where it 
was none of their business ; and both parties 
had meted out to this new and, as they 
deemed it, pestilent sect, unstinted con- 
demnation. But at last the voters of this 
despised cult had turned a presidential elec- 
tion and were making inroads in both par- 
ties. Half a dozen Northern States, in which 
in 1835 "no protest had been made against 
the fugitive slave law of 1793," had already 
passed "personal liberty laws" intended to 
obstruct and nullify that law. And now it 
was "slave-catchers" and not Abolitionists 
who were being mobbed in the North. 

Boston had reversed its attitude toward 
the Abohtionists. On May 31, 1849, the 
New England Anti-Slavery Society was 
holding its annual convention in that very 

96 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Faneuil Hall where, in 1835, Abolitionism 
had been so roundly condemned; and now 
Wendell Phillips, pointing to one of two 
fugitive slaves, who then sat triumphantly 
on the platform, said, "amid great applause, 
. . . 'We say that they may make their 
little laws in Washington, but that Faneuil 
Hall repeals them, in the name of the hu- 
manity of Massachusetts.'" ^ 

Poets headed by Whittier and Long- 
fellow, authors like Emerson and Lowell, 
and orators like Theodore Parker and Wen- 
dell Phillips, had joined the agitators, and 
all united in assaulting the fugitive slave 
law. The following, from James Russell 
Lowell's "Biglow Papers," No. i, June, 
1840, is a specimen of the literature that 
was stirring up hostility against slavery and 
the "slave-catcher" in the breasts of many 
thousands, who were joining in an anti- 
slavery crusade while disdaining compan- 
ionship with the Abolitionists: 

"Ain't it cute to see a Yankee 
Take such everlastin' pains 
All to get the Devil's Thankee 
Helpin' on 'em weld their chains?" 
'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. Ill, p. 247. 

97 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

W'y it's jest es clear es figgers, 
Clear es one and one makes two, 
Chaps that makes black slaves of niggers 
Want to make w'ite slaves o' you. 

In the meantime the people of the South, 
much excited, were resorting to repression, 
passing laws to prevent slaves from being 
taught to read, and laws, in some States, 
inhibiting assemblages of slaves above given 
numbers, unless some white person were 
present — all as safeguards against insur- 
rection. Thus, in 1835, an indictment was 
found in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, 
against one Williams, who had never been 
in Alabama, for circulating there an alleged 
incendiary document, and Governor Gayle 
made requisition on Governor Marcy, of 
New York, for the extradition of Williams. 
Governor Marcy denied the request. The 
case was the same as that more recently 
decided by the Supreme Court of the United 
States, when it held that editors of New 
York and Indiana papers could not be 
brought to the District of Columbia for 
trial. 

The South, all the while clamoring to have 
the agitators put down, had by still other 
98 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

means than these contributed to the ever- 
increasing excitement in the North. South- 
erners had mobbed AboHtionists, and 
whipped and driven out of the country 
persons found in possession of The Liberator 
or suspected of circulating other incendi- 
ary literature. And violence in the South 
against the Abolitionists had precisely the 
same effect on the Northern mind as the 
violence against them in the North had from 
1835 to 1838, but there was this difference: 
the refugee from the distant South, whether 
he were an escaped slave or a fleeing Abo- 
litionist, could color and exaggerate the 
wrongs he had suffered and so parade him- 
self as a martyr. While this was true, it 
was also quite often true that the outrage 
committed in the South against the suspect 
was real enough — a mob had whipped and 
expelled him without any trial. Ayid this is 
another of the lessons as to the evil efects of 
mob law that crop out all through the history 
of the anti-slavery crusade. No good can come 
from violatifig the law. 

In 1848 another presidential election 
turned on the anti-slavery vote, this time 
again in New York State. Anti-slavery 
99 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

Democrats bolted the Democratic ticket, 
thus electing General Taylor, the Whig 
candidate. 

In the canvass preceding this election 
originated, we are told, the catch-phrase 
applied to Cass, the Democratic candidate 
— "a Northern man with Southern prin- 
ciples." The phrase soon became quite 
common, South and North — "a Southern 
man with Northern principles," and vice 
versa. 

The invention and use of it in 1848 shows 
the progress that had been made in array- 
ing one section of the Union against the 
other. Later, a telling piece of doggerel in 
Southern canvasses, and it must also have 
been used North, was 

He wired in and wired out, 
Leaving the people all in doubt. 
Whether the snake that made the track 
Was going North, or coming back. 

Over the admission of California in 1849 
there was another battle. California, 734 
miles long, with about 50,000 people (less 
than the usual number), and with a consti- 
tution improvised under military govern- 
100 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

ment, applied for admission as a State. 
Southerners insisted on extending the Hne 
of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, 
thereby making of the new territory two 
States. The South had been much embit- 
tered by the opposition to the admission of 
Texas. Texas was, nearly all of it, below 
the Missouri Compromise line, and the 
South thought it was equitably entitled to 
come in under that agreement. Its case, 
too, differed from that of Missouri, which 
already belonged to the United States when 
it applied for admission as a State. Texas, 
with all its vast wealth, was asking to come 
in without price. 

Another continuing and increasing cause 
of distraction had been the use made by 
Abolitionists of the right of petition. As 
already shown, petitions to Congress against 
slavery had been received without question 
till 1836, when Northern conservatives and 
Southern members, hoping to abate this 
source of agitation, had combined to pass 
a resolution to lay them on the table, which 
meant that they were to be no further no- 
ticed. The Abolitionists were so delighted 
over the indefensible position into which 

lOI 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

they had driven the conservatives — the 
"gag law" — that they continued, up to the 
crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry 
in monster petitions, one after another. 
The debates provoked by the presentation 
of these petitions, and the more and more 
heated discussions in Congress of slavery 
in the States, which was properly a local and 
not a national question, now attracted still 
wider public attention. The Abolitionists 
had almost succeeded in arraying the entire 
sections against each other, in making of 
the South and North two hostile nations. 
Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the 
Faculty of Political Science in Columbia 
University, says: "It would not be extrava- 
gant to say that the whole course of the 
internal history of the United States from 
1836 to 1861 was more largely determined 
by the struggle in Congress, over the Aboli- 
tion -petitions and the use of the mails for 
the Abolition literature, than anything 
else." 1 

The South had its full share in the hot 
debates that took place over these matters 
in Congress. Its congressmen were quite 

» "The Middle Period," John W. Burgess, p. 274. 
102 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

as aggressive as those from the North, and 
they were accused of being imperious in 
manner, when demanding that a stop should 
be put to AboHtion petitions, and AboHtion 
Hterature going South in the mails. 

There was another cause of complaint 
from the South, and this was grave. By 
the "two underground railroads" that had 
been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 
annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, 
were secretly escorted into or through the 
free States to Canada. To show how all 
this was then regarded by those who sym- 
pathized with the Abolitionists, and how it 
is still looked upon by some modern his- 
torians, the following is given from Hart's 
"Abolition and Slavery": 

"The underground railroad was manned 
chiefly by orderly citizens, members of 
churches, and philanthropical citizens. To 
law-abiding folk what could be more delight- 
ful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed 
slave, exasperati7ig a cruel master, and at the 
same time incurring the penalties of defying 
an unrighteous lawV 

Southerners at that time thought that 
conductors on that line were practising, and 
103 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

readers of the above paragraph will prob- 
ably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive 
rhetoric is now extolling in his history, 
"higher law doctrines." 

It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, 
a large majority of the Northern people 
strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists 
and their methods. Modern historians care- 
fully point out the difference between the 
great body of Northern anti-slavery people 
and the Abolitionists. Nevertheless, here 
were majorities in eleven Northern States 
voting for, and sustaining, the legislators 
who passed and kept upon the statute books 
laws which were intended to enable South- 
ern slaves to escape from their masters. 
The enactment and the support of these 
laws was an attack upon the constitutional 
rights of slave-holders; and Southern people 
looked upon all the voters who sustained 
these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, 
speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the 
North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in 
one common crusade against slavery. From 
the Southern stand-point a difference be- 
tween them could only be made by a 
Hudibras: 

104 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

He was in logic a great critic 

Profoundly skilled in analytic, 

He could distinguish and divide 

A hair 'twixt South and South West side. 

As to how much of the formidable anti- 
slavery sentiment of that day had been 
created by the AboHtionists, we have this 
opinion of a distinguished English traveller 
and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was 
in Washington, in 1850, studying America. 
He says: 

" Extreme men like Garrison seldom have 
justice done to them. It is true they may 
be impracticable, both as to their measures 
and their men, but that unmixed evil is the 
result of their exertions, all history of opin- 
ion in every country, I think, contradicts. 
Such ultra men are as necessary as the more 
moderate and reasonable advocates of any 
growing opinion; and, as an impartial per- 
son, who never happened to fall in with one 
of the party in the course of my tour, I must 
express my belief that the present wide 
diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment in the 
United States is, in no small degree, owing 
to their exertions." ^ 

' "Notes on North America," London, 185 1, vol. II, p. 486. 
105 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

And Professor Smith, of Williams College, 
speaking of the anti-slavery feeling in the 
North in 1850, says: 

"This sentiment of the free States re- 
garding slavery was to a large degree the 
result of an agitation for its abolition which 
had been active for a score of years (183 1- 
1850) without any positive results." ^ 

But no matter what had produced it, the 
anti-slavery sentiment that pervaded the 
North in 1850 boded ill to slavery and to 
the Constitution, and the South was bitterly 
complaining. Congress met in December, 
1849, and was to sit until October, 1850. 
Lovers of the Union, North and South, 
watched its proceedings with the deepest 
anxiety. The South was much excited. 
The continual torrent of abuse to which it 
was subjected, the refusal to allow slavery 
in States to be created from territory in the 
South-west that was below the. parallel of 
the Missouri Compromise, and the complete 
nullification of the fugitive slave law, seemed 
to many to be no longer tolerable, and from 
sundry sources in that section came threats 
of secession. 

' "Parties and Slaver}'," Smith, pp. 3, 4. 
106 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

In 1849-50 the South was demanding a 
division of California, an efficient fugitive 
slave law, and that the territories of New 
Mexico and Arizona should be organized 
with no restrictions as to slavery. Other 
minor demands were unimportant. 

Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. 
Douglas, Lewis Cass, and other conserva- 
tive leaders came forward and, after long 
and heated debates in Congress, the Com- 
promise of 1850 was agreed on. To satisfy 
the North, California, as a whole, came in as 
a -free State, and the slave trade was abol- 
ished in the District of Columbia. To sat- 
isfy the South, a new and stringent fugitive 
slave law was agreed on, and the territories 
of New Mexico and Arizona were organized 
with no restrictions as to slavery. 

In bringing about this compromise, Daniel 
Webster was, next to Clay, the most con- 
spicuous figure. He was the favorite son of 
New England and the greatest statesman 
in all the North. On the 7th of March, 
1850, Mr. Webster made one of the greatest 
speeches of his life on the Compromise meas- 
ures. Rising above the sectional prejudices 
of the hour, he spoke for the Constitution 
107 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

and the Union. The manner in which he 
and his reputation were treated by popular 
historians in the North, for half a century 
afterward, on account of this speech, is the 
most pathetic and, at the same time, the 
most instructive story in the whole history 
of the anti-slavery crusade. 

Mr. Webster was under the ban of North- 
ern public opinion for all this half a century, 
not because of inconsistency between that 
speech and his former avowals, an averment 
often made and never proven, but because 
he was consistent. He stood squarely upon 
his record, and the venom of the assaults 
that were afterward made upon him was 
just in proportion to the love and venera- 
tion which had been his before he offended. 
His offence was that he would not move with 
the anti-slavery movement.^ He did not 
stand with his section in a sectional dispute. 

Henry Clay, old and feeble, had come 
back into the Senate to render his last 
service to his country. He was the author 
of the Compromise. Daniel Webster was 
everywhere known as the champion of the 

1 McMastersays: "The great statesman was behind the times." 
— "Webster," p. 19. 

108 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Union. Henry Clay was known as the "Old 
Man Eloquent," and he now spoke with all 
his old-time fire; but Webster's great speech 
probably had more influence on the result. 

Before taking up Mr. Webster's speech 
his previous attitude toward slavery must 
be noted. The purpose of the friends of the 
Union was, of course, to effect a compromise 
that would, if possible, put an end to sec- 
tional strife. Compromise means concession, 
and a compromise of political differences, 
made by statesmen, may involve some con- 
cession of view previously held by those who 
advocate as well as by those who accept it. 
Webster thought his section of the Union 
should now make concessions. 

Fanaticism, however, concedes nothing; 
it never compromises, although statesman- 
ship does. One of the most notable utter- 
ances of Edmund Burke was: 

^* All government^ indeed every human bene- 
fit and enjoyment^ every virtue and every 
prudent act, is founded 07i compromise and 
barter'* 

Great statesmen, on great occasions, 
speak not only to their countrymen and 
for the time being, but they speak to all 
109 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

mankind and for all time. So spoke Burke 
in that famous sentence when advocating, 
in the British Parliament in 1776, "concili- 
ation with America"; and so did Daniel 
Webster speak, in the Senate of the United 
States, on the 7th of March, 1850, for "the 
Constitution and the Union." If George III 
and Lord North had heeded Burke, and if the 
British government and people, from that 
day forth, had followed the wise counsels 
given in that speech by their greatest states- 
man, all the English-speaking peoples of the 
world, now numbering over 170,000,000, 
might have been to-day under one govern- 
ment, that government commanding the 
peace of the world. And if all the people 
of the United States in 1850 and from that 
time on, had heeded the words of Daniel 
Webster, we should have been spared the 
bloodiest war in the book of time; every 
State of the Union would have been left free 
to solve its own domestic problems, and it is 
not too much to say that these problems 
would have been solved in full accord with 
the advancing civilization of the age. 

The sole charge of inconsistency against 
Webster that has in it a shadow of truth 
no 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

relates to the proposition he made in his 
speech as to the "Wilmot proviso." That 
celebrated proviso was named for David 
Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, its author. It 
provided against slavery in all the territory 
acquired from Mexico. The South had op- 
posed the Wilmot proviso because the ter- 
ritory in question, much of it, was south 
of the Missouri Compromise line extended. 
Mr. Webster had often voted for the Wil- 
mot proviso, as all knew. In his speech for 
the Compromise, by which the South was 
urged to and did give up its contentions as 
to the admission of California, and its con- 
tentions as to the slave trade in the District 
of Columbia, Webster argued that the North 
might forego the proviso as to New Mexico 
and Arizona for the reason that the pro- 
viso was, as to these territories, immaterial. 
Those territories, he argued, would never 
come in as slave States, because the God 
of nature had so determined. Climate and 
soil would forbid. Time vindicated this 
argument. In 1861 Charles Francis Adams 
said, in Congress, that New Mexico, open 
to slave-holders and their slaves for more 
than ten years, then had only twelve slaves 
III 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

domiciled on the surface of over 200,000 
square miles of her extent.^ 

Daniel Webster's services to the cause of 
the Union, the preservation of which had 
been the passion of his life, had been abso- 
lutely unparalleled. It is perhaps true that 
without him Abraham Lincoln and the 
armies of the Union in 1861-65 would have 
been impossible. The sole and, as he then 
stated and as time proved, immaterial con- 
cession this champion of the Union now 
(1850) made for the sake of preserving the 
Union was his proposition as to New Mex- 
ico and Arizona. 

Henry Clay spoke before Webster. These 
words were the key-note of Clay's great 
speech: "In my opinion the body politic 
cannot be preserved unless this agitation, 
this distraction, this exasperation, which is 
going on between the two sections of the 
country, shall cease." 

The country waited with anxiety to hear 
from Webster. Hundreds of suggestions 
and appeals went to him. Both sides were 
hopeful.- Anti-slavery people knew his 

» "Vindication of Webster," William C. Wilkinson, p. 69. 
^McMaster's "Webster." 

112 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

aversion to slavery. He had never coun- 
tenanced anti-slavery agitation, but he had 
voted for the Wilmot proviso. They knew, 
too, that he had long been ambitious to be 
President, and, carried away by their en- 
thusiasm, they hoped that Webster would 
swim along with the tide that was sweeping 
over the majority section of the Union. In 
view of Mr. Webster's past record, how- 
ever, it would be difficult to believe that 
Abolitionists were really disappointed in 
him had we not many such proofs as the 
following stanza from Whittier's ode, pub- 
lished after the speech: 

Oh! dumb be passing, stormy rage 

When he who might 
Have lighted up and led his age 

Falls back in night! 

The conservatives also were hopeful. 
TTiey knew that, though Webster had al- 
ways been, as an individual, opposed to sla- 
very, he had at all times stood by the Con- 
stitution, as well as the Union. At no time 
had he ever qualified or retracted these 
words in his speech at Niblo's Garden in 
1839: "Slavery, as it exists in the States, is 
"3 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

beyond the reach of Congress. It is a con- 
cern of the States themselves. They have 
never submitted it to Congress, and Con- 
gress has no rightful power over it. I shall 
concur therefore in no act, no measure, no 
menace, no indication of purpose which shall 
interfere or threaten to interfere with the ex- 
clusive authority of the several States over 
the subject of slavery, as it exists within 
their respective limits. All this appears 
to me to be matter of plain imperative 
duty." 

Nullifying the fugitive slave law was a 
plain ''interference" with the rights of the 
slave States. 

Mr. Webster's intent, when he spoke on 
the Compromise measures, is best explained 
by his own words, on June 17, while these 
measures were still pending: "Sir, my ob- 
ject is peace. My object is reconciliation. 
My purpose is not to make up a case /or the 
North or a case /or the South. My object is 
not to continue useless and irritating con- 
troversies. I am against agitators. North 
and South, and all narrow local contests. I 
am an American, and I know no locality 
but America." 

114 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

In his speech made on the 7th of March 
he dwelt at length on existing conditions, on 
the attitude of the North toward the fugi- 
tive slave law, and argued fully the ques- 
tions involved in the "personal liberty" 
laws passed by Northern States. Referring 
to the complaints of the South about these, 
he said: "In that respect the Souths in my 
judgment, is right and the North is wrong. 
Every member of every Northern legisla- 
ture is bound by oath, like every other officer 
in the country, to support the Constitution 
of the United States; and the article of the 
Constitution which says to these States 
that they shall deliver up fugitives from ser- 
vice is as bi^iding in honor and conscience as 
any other article. No man fulfils his duty in 
any legislature who sets himself to find excuses y 
evasions, escapes, fro7n this constitutional ob- 
ligation.'' 

And further on he said: "Then, sir, there 
are the Abolition societies, of which I am 
unwilling to speak, but in regard to which 
I have very clear notions and opinions. I 
do not think them useful. / think their oper- 
ations for the last twenty years have produced 
nothing good or valuable. . . . I cannot but 
115 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

see what mischief their interference with the 
South has produced.^' 

In these statements is the substance of 
Webster's offending. 

Webster's speech was followed, on the 
nth of March, by the speech of Senator 
Seward, of New York, in the same debate. 
Quoting the fugitive slave provision of 
the Federal Constitution, Mr. Seward said : 
"This is from the Constitution of the United 
States in 1787, and the parties were the 
Republican States of the Union. The law 
of nations disavows such compacts; the law 
of nature, written on the hearts a7id consciences 
of freemen, repudiates them."^ The people 
of the North, instead of following Webster, 
chose to follow Seward, the apostle of a 
law higher tha?i the Constitution; and when, 
ten years later, it appeared to them that 
the whole North had given in its adhesion 
to the "higher law" doctrine, the people of 
eleven Southern States seceded, and put 
over themselves in very substance the Con- 
stitution that Seward had flouted and Web- 
ster had pleaded for in vain. 

^Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, ist session, Appendix, 
p. 263. 

116 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Anti-slavery enthusiasts in the North gen- 
erally, and Abolitionists especially, in their 
comments on Webster's speech scouted the 
idea that the preservation of the Union 
depended upon the faithful execution of the 
fugitive slave law or the cessation of anti- 
slavery agitation. "What," said Theodore 
Parker, "cast off the North! They set up 
for themselves! Tush! Tush! Fear boys 
with bugs! ... I think Mr. Webster knew 
there was no danger of a dissolution of the 
Union." ' 

The immediate effect of the speech was 
wonderful; congratulations poured in upon 
Mr. Webster from conservative classes in 
every quarter, and he must have felt grati- 
fied to know that he had contributed greatly 
to the enactment of measures that, for a 
time, had some effect in allaying sectional 
strife. But the revilings of the Abolition- 
ists prevailed, and it turned out that Dan- 
iel Webster, great as he was, had under- 
taken a task that was too much even for 
him. His enemies struck out boldly at once : 
and years afterward, when the anti-slavery 
movement that Webster's appeals could 

' "Vindication of Webster," William C. Wilkinson, p. 191. 
117 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

not arrest had culminated in secession, and 
when the Union had been saved by arms, 
the triumphant hosts of the anti-slavery 
crusade all but succeeded in writing Daniel 
Webster down permanently in the history 
of his country as an apostate from principle 
for the sake of an office he did not get. 
Here is their verdict, which Mr. Lodge, a 
biographer of Webster, passes on into 
history: 

"The popular verdict has been given 
against the yth of March speech, and that 
verdict has passed into history. Nothing can 
be said or done which will alter the fact 
that the people of this country, zvho main- 
tained and saved the Union, have passed judg- 
ment on Mr. Webster, and condemned what 
he said on the yth of March as wrong in 
principle and mistaken in policy. ' 

Here are specimens of the assaults that 
were made on Webster after his speech. 
They are selected from among many given 
by one of his biographers.^ 

"'Webster,' said Horace Mann, 'is a 
fallen star! Lucifer descended from Heaven.' 
. . . 'Webster,' said Sumner, 'has placed 

* McMaster's "Webster," p. 316 et seq. 
118 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

himself in the dark hst of apostates/ When 
Whittier named him Ichabod, and mourned 
for him in verse as one dead, he did but ex- 
press the feehng of half New England : 

'Let not the land once proud of him 

Mourn for him now, 
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim 
Dishonored brow. 

Then pay the reverence of old days 

To his dead fame! 
Walk backward with averted gaze 

And hide his shame.' " 

After much more to the same effect, Pro- 
fessor McMaster proceeds: "The attack by 
the press, the expressions of horror that rose 
from New England, Webster felt keenly, 
but the absolute isolation in which he was 
left by his New England colleagues cut him 
to the quick." ^ 

On Mr. Webster's speech, its purpose and 
effect, we have this opinion from Mr. Lodge: 

"The speech, if exactly defined, is in re- 

' Professor McMaster in the chapter preceding that containing 
these extracts, has collected much evidence to show that Web- 
ster aspired to be President, and the biographer entitles the 
chapter, "Longing for the Presidency," apparently the author's 
clod on the grave of a buried reputation. 

119 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

ality a powerful effort, not for a compromise, 
or for the fugitive slave law, or for any other 
one thing, but to arrest the whole anti-slavery 
movement, and in that way put an end to the 
danger which threatened the Union and restore 
harmony to the jarring sections. ^^ 

And then he adds: 

"/^ was a mad project. Mr. Webster 
might as well have attempted to stay the in- 
coming tide at Marshfield with a rampart of 
sand, as to check the anti-slavery movement 
with a speech y 

To undertake at this time to arrest the 
whole anti-slavery movement by holding up 
the Constitution was indeed useless. 

Seward, who had spoken for the "higher 
law," was riding on the tide of anti-slavery 
sentiment that was submerging "the Sage 
of Marshfield," who had stood for the Con- 
stitution. Seward's reputation, in the years 
following, went steadily up, while Web- 
ster's was going down. Webster died, in 
dejection, in 1852. 

Seward, at Rochester, in 1854, later on in 
the same crusade, made another famous dec- 
laration — there was an "irrepressible con- 
flict between slavery and freedom." The 
120 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

conflict was "irrepressible," as Seward well 
knew; and this was simply and solely be- 
cause the anti-slavery crusade could not be 
suppressed. Clay and Webster, now both 
dead and gone, had tried it in vain. Every 
one knew that if, in 1850, or at any other 
time, the anti-slavery hosts had halted, and 
asked for, or consented to, peace, they could 
have had it at once. 

Mr. Lodge, in the following paragraph, 
seems to have almost made up his mind 
to defend Webster. He says: "What most 
shocked the North were his utterances in 
regard to the fugitive slave law. There can 
be no doubt that, under the Constitution, the 
South had a perfect right to claim the extra- 
dition of fugitive slaves. The legal argu- 
ment to support that right was excellent.** 
This would seem to justify the speech in 
that regard. "But," Mr. Lodge adds, "the 
Northern people could not feel that it was 
necessary for Daniel Webster to make it." 
They wanted him to be sectional or to hold 
his tongue. Then Mr. Lodge goes on to 
say: "The fugitive slave law was in abso- 
lute conflict with the awakened conscience and 
moral sentiment of the North." 
121 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

The conscience of the North at that time, 
Mr. Lodge means, was a higher law than the 
Constitution; and Webster's "excellent ar- 
gument," therefore, fell on deaf ears. 

No American historian stands higher as 
an authority than Mr. Rhodes. He says 
on page i6i, vol. I, of his "History of the 
United States," published in 1892: ''Until 
the closing years of our century a dispassion- 
ate judgment could not be made of Webster; 
but we see now that in the war of secession 
his principles were mightier than those of 
Garrison. It was not ' No Union with slave- 
holders,' but Liberty and Union that won." 

This tribute to semces Webster had ren- 
dered to the Union in his great speech in 
1850, in which he advocated "Liberty and 
Union, now and forever," exactly as he was 
advocating it in 1830, is just. How pathetic 
that the historian was impelled also to 
record the fact, in the same sentence, that 
for nearly half a century partisan prejudice 
had rendered it impossible to form a dis- 
passionate judgment of him who had pleaded 
in vain for the Union without war! 

After an able analysis of his "7th of 
March speech," and a discussion of his 
122 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

record, in which he paralleled Webster and 
Edmund Burke, Mr. Rhodes declares: 
*'His dislike of slavery was strong, but his 
love of the Union was stronger, and the more 
powerful motive outweighed the other, for 
he believed that the crusade against slavery 
had arrived at a point where its further prose- 
cution was hurt/id to the Union. As has been 
said of Burke, 'He changed his front but 
he never changed his ground.'" ^ 

Daniel Webster's name and its place in 
history may be likened to a giant oak, a 
monarch of the forest, that, while towering 
high above all others, was stripped of its 
branches; for a time it stood, a rugged 
trunk, robbed of its glory by a cyclone; 
but its roots were deep down in the rich 
earth; the storm is passing away; the tree 
has put out buds again; now its branches 
are stretching out once more into the clear 
reaches of the upper air. 

Mr. Rhodes seems to be the first historian 
of note to do justice to Daniel Webster and 
the great speech which, McMaster takes 
pains to inform us, historians have written 
down as his "7th of March speech," in spite 

' Ih., p. 160. 
123 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

of the fact that Mr. Webster himself en- 
titled it "The Constitution and the Union." 

Other historians besides Mr. Rhodes have 
come to the rescue of Webster's speech for 
"the Constitution and the Union." Mr. 
John Fiske says of it in a volume (post- 
humous) published in 1907: "So far as Mr. 
Webster's moral attitude was concerned, 
although he was not prepared for the bitter 
hostility that his speech provoked in many 
quarters, he must nevertheless have known 
it was quite as likely to injure him at the 
North as to gain support for him in the 
South, and his resolute adoption of a policy 
that he regarded as national rather than 
sectional was really an instance of high 
moral courage." ^ 

Mr. William C. W^ilkinson has recently 
written an able "Vindication of Daniel 
Webster," and, after a conclusive argu- 
ment on that branch of his subject, he 
says: "Webster's consistency stands like 
a rock on the shore after the fretful waves 
are tired with beating upon it in vain." " 

* "Daniel Webster and the Sentiment of Union," John Fiske, 
" Essays Historical and Literan,-," pp. 408-9. 
" "Daniel Webster: A Vindication," p. 47. 

124 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Mr. E. P. Wheeler, concluding a masterly- 
sketch of Daniel Webster, setting forth his 
services as statesman and expounder of 
the Constitution, and not deigning to notice 
the partisan charges against him, concludes 
with these words: 

"Great men elevate and ennoble their 
countrymen. In the glory of Webster we 
find the glory of our whole country." 

The story of Daniel Webster and his great 
speech in 1850 has been told at some length 
because it is instructive. The historians who 
had set themselves to the task of upholding 
the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the 
South, during the controversy over slavery, 
and not that of the North, that brought 
on secession and war, could not make good 
their contention while Daniel Webster and 
his speech for "the Constitution and the 
Union" stood in their way. They, there- 
fore, wrote the great statesman "down and 
out," as they conceived. But Webster and 
that speech still stand as beacon lights in 
the history of that crusade. The attack 
came from the North. The South, standing 
for its constitutional rights in the Union, 
was the conservative party. Southern 
125 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

leaders, it is true, were, during the contro- 
versy over slavery, often aggressive, but 
they were on the defensive — aggressive, just 
as Lee was when he made his campaign into 
Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping 
the invasion of his own land; and the South 
lost in her political campaign just for the 
same reason that Lee lost in his Gettysburg 
campaign: numbers and resources were 
against her. "The stars in their courses 
fought against Sisera." 

Mr. Webster in his great speech for "the 
Constitution and the Union," as became a 
great statesman pleading for conciliation, 
measured the terms in which he condemned 
"personal liberty" laws and Abolitionism. 
But afterward, irritated by the attacks 
made upon him, he naturally spoke out 
more emphatically. McMaster quotes sev- 
eral expressions from his speeches and letters 
replying to these assaults, and says: "His 
hatred of Abolitionists and Free-soilers grew 
stronger and stronger. To him these men 
were a "band of sectionalists, narrow of 
mind, wanting in patriotism, without a 
spark of national feeling, and quite ready 
to see the Union go to pieces if their own 
126 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

selfish ends were gained." Such, if this is 
a fair summing up of his views, was Web- 
ster's final opinion of those who were 
carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade/ 

' McMaster's " Webster," p. 340. 



127 



CHAPTER VII 
EFFORTS FOR PEACE 

THE desire for peace in 1850 was wide- 
spread. Union loving people, North 
and South, hoped that the Compromise 
would result in a cessation of the strife that 
had so long divided the section; and the 
election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as 
President, on a platform strongly approv- 
ing that Compromise, was promising. But 
anti-slavery leaders, instead of being con- 
vinced by such arguments as those of Web- 
ster, were deeply offended by the contention 
that legislators, in passing personal liberty 
laws, had violated their oaths to support 
the Constitution. They were angered also 
by the presumptuous attempt to "arrest 
the whole anti-slavery movement." 

The new fugitive slave law was strin- 
gent; it did not give jury trial; it required 
bystanders to assist the officers in "slave- 
catching," etc. For these and other reasons 
the law was assailed as unconstitutional. 
128 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

All these contentions were overruled by 
the Supreme Court when a case eventually 
came before it. The court decided that 
the act was, in all its provisions, fully 
authorized by the Constitution.^ But in 
their present mood, no law that was effi- 
cient would have been satisfactory to the 
multitudes of people, by no means all 
"Abolitionists," who had already made up 
their minds against the "wicked" provision 
of the Constitution that required the de- 
livery of fugitive slaves. This deep-seated 
feeling of opposition to the return to their 
masters of escaping slaves was soon to be 
wrought up to a high pitch by a novel that 
went into nearly every household through- 
out the North — "Uncle Tom's Cabin." On 
its appearance the poet Whittier, who had 
so ferociously attacked Webster in the verses 
quoted in the last chapter, "offered up 
thanks for the fugitive slave law, for it gave 
us 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'" 

Rufus Choate, a celebrated lawyer and 
Whig leader, is reported to have said of 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin": "That book will 
make two millions of Abolitionists." Draw- 

1 Ableman v. Boothc, 21 How., 506. 
129 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

ing, as it did, a very dark picture of slavery, 
it aroused sympathy for the escaping slave 
and pictured in glowing colors the dear, 
sweet men and women who dared, for his 
sake, the perils of the road in the darkness 
of night and all the dangers of the law. 
Mrs. Stowe was making heroes of law- 
breakers^ preaching the higher law. 

Mrs. Stowe declared she had not written 
the book for political effect; she certainly 
did not anticipate the marvellous results 
that followed it. That book made vast 
multitudes of its readers ready for the new 
sectional and anti-slavery party that was to 
be organized two years after its appearance. 
It was the most famous and successful novel 
ever written. It was translated into every 
language that has a literature, and has been 
more read by American people than any 
other book except the Bible. As a picture 
of what was conceivable under the laws 
relating to slavery there was a basis for it. 
Though there were laws limiting the master^s 
power, cruelty was nevertheless possible. 

Here, then, Mrs. Stowe's imagination had 
full scope. Her book, however, has in it 
none of the strident harshness, none of the 
130 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

purblind ferocity of Garrison, in whose eyes 
every slave-holder was a fiend. "Uncle 
Tom's Cabin" assailed a system; it did not 
assault personally, as the arch-agitator did, 
every man and woman to whom slaves had 
come, whether by choice or chance. Light 
and shadow and the play of human nature 
made Mrs. Stowe's picture as attractive in 
many of its pages as it was repulsive and 
unfair in others. Mrs. Shelby was a type of 
many a noble mistress, a Christian woman, 
and when financial misfortunes compelled 
the sale of the Shelby slaves and the sepa- 
ration of families, we have not only what 
might have been, but what sometimes was, 
one of the evils of slavery, which, by reason 
of the prevailing agitation, the humanity 
of the age could not remedy. But Mrs. 
Stowe's slave-master, Legree, was impos- 
sible. The theory was inconceivable that 
it was cheaper to work to death in seven 
years a slave costing a thousand dollars, 
than to work him for forty years. Millions 
of our people, however, have accepted 
"Uncle Tom" as a fact, and have wept over 
him; they have accepted also as a fact the 
monster Legree. 

131 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" lives to-day as a 
classic on book shelves and as a popular 
play. The present generation get most of 
their opinions about slavery as it was in 
the South from its pages, and not one in 
ten thousand of those who read it ever 
thinks of the inconsistency between the 
picture of slavery drawn there and that 
other picture, which all the world now knows 
of — the Confederate soldier away in the 
army, his wife and children at home faith- 
fully protected by slaves — not a case of 
violence, not even a single established case, 
during four years, although there were four 
millions of negroes in the South, of that 
crime against white women that, after the 
reconstruction had demoralized the freed- 
men, became so common in that section. 

The unwavering fidelity during the four 
years of war of so many slaves to the families 
of their absent masters, and the fact that 
those who, during that war, left their homes 
to seek their freedom invariably went with- 
out doing any vengeful act, is a phenomenon 
that speaks for itself. It tells of kindly re- 
lations between master and slave. It is not 
to be denied that where the law gave so 
132 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

much power to the master there were in- 
dividual instances of cruelty, nor is it sup- 
posable that there were not many slaves 
who were revengeful; but at the same time 
there was, quite naturally, among slaves 
who were all in like case, a more clannish 
and all-pervading public opinion than could 
have been found elsewhere. It was that all- 
pervading and rigid standard of kindly feel- 
ing among the slaves to their masters that 
made the rule universal — fidelity toward the 
master's family, at least to the extent of 
inflicting no injury. 

What a surprise to many this conduct of 
the slave was may be gathered from a telling 
Republican speech made by Carl Schurz 
during the campaign of 1860.^ A devotee 
of liberty, recently a revolutionist in his 
native land, and, like other foreigners, dis- 
regarding all constitutional obstacles, Mr. 
Schurz had naturally espoused the cause of 
anti-slavery in this country. He had ab- 
sorbed the views of his political associates 
and now contended that secession was an 
empty threat and that secession was im- 
possible. " The mere anticipation of a negro 

1 Fite, "Presidential Campaign of i860," p. 243. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

insurrection," he said, "will paralyze the 
whole South." And, after ridiculing the 
alarm created by the John Brown invasion, 
the orator said that in case of a war between 
the South and the North, "they will not 
have men enough to quiet their friends at 
home ; what will they have to oppose to the 
enemy? Every township will want its home 
regiment; every plantation its garrison; and 
what will be Left for its field army?" 

Slavery in the South eventually proved 
to be, instead of a weakness, an element 
of strength to the Confederates, and Mr. 
Lincoln finally felt himself compelled to 
issue his proclamation of emancipation as 
a military necessity — the avowed purpose 
being to deprive the Confederates of the 
slaves who were by their labor supporting 
their armies in the field. 

The faithfulness during the war of the 
slave to his master has been a lesson to the 
Northerner, and it has been a lesson, too, to 
the Southerner. It argues that the danger 
of bloody insurrections was perhaps not 
as great as had been apprehended where 
incendiary publications were sent among 
them. That danger, however, did exist, and 
134 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

if the fear of it was exaggerated, it was 
nevertheless real, and was traceable to the 
Abolitionists. 

The rights of the South in the territories 
had now been discussed for years, and 
Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator 
from Illinois, had reached the conclusion 
that under the Constitution Southerner and 
Northerner had exactly the same right to 
carry their property, whatever it might be, 
into the territories, which had been pur- 
chased with the common blood and treasure 
of both sections, a view afterward sustained 
by the Supreme Court of the United States 
in the Dred Scott case. Douglas, "entirely 
of his own motion," ^ introduced, and 
Congress passed, such a bill — the Kansas- 
Nebraska act. The new act replaced the 
Missouri Compromise. This the Southern- 
ers considered had been a dead letter for 
years. Every "personal liberty" law passed 
by a Northern State was a violation of it. 

Ambition was now playing its part in the 
sectional controversy. Douglas was a Dem- 
ocrat looking to the presidency and had 

'"Parties and Slavery," Theodore Clarke Smith, professor of 
history in Williams College, p. 96. 



y 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

here made a bid for Southern support. On 
the other hand was Seward, an "old hne 
Whig," aspiring to the same office. The 
South had been the dominant element in 
national poHtics and the North was getting 
tired of it. Seward's idea was to organize 
all the anti-slavery voters and to appeal at 
the same time to the pride and jealousy of 
the North as a section. 

The immediate effect of the Kansas- 
Nebraska act was to aggravate sectionalism. 
It opened up the territory of Kansas, allow- 
ing it to come into the Union with or with- 
out slavery, as it might choose. Slave State 
and free State adventurers rushed into 
the new territory and struggled, and even 
fought, for supremacy. The Southerners 
lost. Their resources could not match the 
means of organized anti-slavery societies, 
and the result was an increase, North and 
South, of sectional animosity. 

The overwhelming defeat of the old Whig 
party in 1852 presaged its dissolution. Un- 
til that election, both the Whig and Demo- 
cratic parties had been national, each en- 
deavoring to hold and acquire strength, 
North and South, and each combating, as 
136 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

best it could, the spirit of sectionalism that 
had been steadily growing in the North, and 
South as well, ever since the rise of Aboli- 
tionism. Both these old parties had watched 
with anxiety the increase of anti-slavery 
sentiment in the North. Both parties 
feared it. Alliance with the anti-slavery 
North would deprive a party of support 
South and denationalize it. ^ For years prior 
to 1852 the drift of Northern voters who 
were opposed to slavery had been as to 
the two national parties toward the Whigs, 
and the tendency of conservative Northern- 
ers had been toward the Democratic party. 
Thus the great body of the Whig voters in 
the North had become imbued with anti- 
slavery sentiments, and now, with no hope 
of victory as a national party and left in a 
hopeless minority, the majority of that old 
party in that section were ready to join a 
sectional party when it should be formed 
two years later. William H. Seward was 
still a Whig when he made in the United 
States Senate his anti-slavery "higher law" 
speech of 1850. 

The Kansas-Nebraska act was a political 
blunder. The South, on any dispassionate 
^Z7 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

consideration, could not have expected to 
make Kansas a slave State. The act was a 
blunder, too, because it gave the opponents 
of the Democratic party a plausible pre- 
text for the contention, which they put 
forth then and which has been persisted in 
till this day, that the new Republican party, 
immediately thereafter organized, was called 
into existence by, and only by, the Kansas- 
Nebraska act. 

As far back as 1850 it was clear that a new 
party, based on the anti-slavery sentiment 
that had been created by twenty years 
of agitation, was inevitable. Mr. Rhodes, 
speaking of conditions then, says: "It was, 
moreover, obvious to an astute politician 
like Seward, and probably to others, that a 
dissolution of parties was imminent; that 
to oppose the extension of slavery, the dif- 
ferent anti-slavery elements must be organized 
as a whole; it might be called Whig or some 
other name, but it would be based on the 
principle of the Wilmot proviso"^ — the 
meaning of which was, no more slave 
States. 

Between 1850 and the passage of the 

' "Rhodes," vol. I, p. 192. 
138 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854, new impulse 
had been given anti-slavery sentiment by 
fierce assaults on the new fugitive slave law 
and, as has been seen, by "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." The Kansas-Nebraska act did 
serve as a cry for the rallying of all anti- 
slavery voters. That was all. It was a 
drum-call, in answer to which soldiers al- 
ready enlisted fell into ranks, under a new 
banner. Any other drum-call — the appli- 
cation of another slave State for admission 
into the Union — would have served quite 
as well. Thus the Republican party came 
into existence in 1854. ^r. Rhodes sums up 
the reason for the existence of the new party 
and what it subsequently accomplished 
in the following pregnant sentence, "The 
moral agitation had accomplished its work, 
the cause (of anti-slavery) . . . was to be 
consigned to a political party that brought to 
a successful conclusion the movement begun 
by the moral sentiment of the community,"^ 
— which successful conclusion was, of course, 
the freeing of the slaves by a successful war. 

For a time the new Republican party 
had a powerful competitor in another new 

' Vol. I, p. 66. 
139 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

organization. This was the American or 
Know-Nothing party. This other aspirant 
for power made an honest effort to revitalize 
the old Whig party under a new name and, 
by gathering in all the conservatives North 
and South, to put an end to sectionalism. 
Its signal failure conveys an instructive les- 
son. After many and wide-spread rumors 
of its coming, the birth of the American 
party was formally announced in 1854. It 
had been organized in secret and was bound 
together with oaths and passwords; its 
members delighted to mystify inquirers by 
refusing to answer questions, and soon they 
got the name of "Know-Nothings." The 
party had grown out of the "Order of the 
Star Spangled Banner," organized in 1850 
to oppose the spread of Catholicism and 
indiscriminate immigration — the two dan- 
gers that were said to threaten American 
institutions. 

The American party made its appeal: 
For the Union and against sectionalism; 
for Protestantism, the faith of the Fathers, 
against Catholicism that was being imported 
by foreigners; its shibboleth was "America 
for the Americans." 

140 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

The Americans or Know-Nothings every- 
where put out in 1854 full tickets and 
showed at once surprising strength. In the 
fall elections of that year they polled over 
one-fourth of all the votes in New York, two- 
fifths in Pennsylvania, and over two-thirds 
in Massachusetts, where they made a clean 
sweep of the State and Federal offices/ 

They struck directly at sectionalism by 
exacting of their adherents the following 
oath: 

"You do further swear that you will not 
vote for any one . . . whom you know or 
believe to be in favor of a dissolution of the 
Union ... or who is endeavoring to pro- 
duce that result." 

The effect of this oath at the South was 
almost magical. The Whig party there 
was speedily absorbed by the Americans, 
and Southern Democrats by thousands 
joined the new party that promised to save 
the Union.- But the attitude of the North- 



' Smith, "Parties and Slaverv"," pp. 118-20. 

■ The writer's father, who had beei\ a nullifier and a lifelong 
follower of Calhoun, joined the Know-Nothings in the hope of 
saving the Union, but withdrew when he found that in the North 
the party was not true to its Union pledges. Here was a typical 
case of Southern unwillingness to resort to secession. 

141 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

em and Southern members of the American 
party soon became fundamentally different. 
Southerners saw their Northern alHes in 
Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts pass- 
ing "personal liberty" laws.^ 

The Know-Nothings were strong enough 
in the elections of 1855 to directly check the 
progress of the new Republican party; but 
the American party, though it succeeded in 
electing a Speaker of the national House 
of Representatives in February, 1856, soon 
afterward went down to defeat. Even 
though led by such patriots as John Bell, of 
Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Massa- 
chusetts, it could not stand against the 
storm of passion that had been aroused by 
the crusade against slavery. 

There was a fierce and protracted struggle 
between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery 
men in Kansas for possession of the territo- 
rial government. Rival constitutions were 
submitted to Congress, and the debates 
over these were extremely bitter. In their 
excitement the Democrats again delighted 
their adversaries by committing what now 
seems to have been another blunder. They 

^Ib., pp. 138-9. 
142 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

advocated the admission of Kansas under 
the "Lecompton Constitution." A review 
of the conflicting evidence appears to show 
that the Southerners were fairly outnum- 
bered in Kansas and that the Lecompton 
Constitution did not express the will of the 
people/ 

While "the war in Kansas" was going on, 
Charles Sumner, an Abolitionist from Mas- 
sachusetts, delivered in the Senate a speech 
of which he wrote his friends beforehand : 
"I shall pronounce the most thorough Phi- 
lippic ever delivered in a legislative body." 
He was a classical scholar. His purpose was 
to stir up in the North a greater fury against 
the South than Demosthenes had aroused in 
Athens against its enemies, the Macedonians. 
His speech occupied two days. May 28 and 
29, 1855. At its conclusion, Senator Cass, 
of Michigan, arose at once and pronounced 
it "the most un-American and unpatriotic 
that ever grated on the ears of this high 
body." The speech attacked, without any 
sufficient excuse, the personal character of 
an absent senator, Butler of South Caro- 
lina, a gentleman of high character and older 

' Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery." 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

than Sumner. Among other unfounded 
charges, it accused him of falsehood. Pres- 
ton Brooks, a representative from South 
Carohna, attacked Sumner in the Senate 
chamber during a recess of that body and 
beat him unmercifully with a cane. The 
provocation was bitter, indeed, but Brooks's 
assault was unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the 
exasperated South applauded it, while the 
North glorified Sumner as a martyr for free 
speech. 

In less than two years the new Republican 
party had absorbed all the Abolition voters, 
and in the election of 1856 was in the field 
with its candidates for the presidency and 
vice-presidency — Fremont and Dayton — 
upon a platform declaring it the duty of 
Congress to abolish in the territories "those 
twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and 
slavery." 

Excitement during that election was in- 
tense. Rufus Choate, the great Massachu- 
setts lawyer, theretofore a Whig, voiced 
the sentiment of conservatives when he said 
it was the "duty of every one to prevent the 
madness of the times from working its mad- 
144 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

dest act — the permanent formation and the 
actual present triumph of a party which 
knows one-half of America only to hate it," 
etc. 

Senator Toombs, of Georgia, said: "The 
object of Fremont's friends is the conquest 
of the South. I am content that they shall 
own us when they conquer us." 

The Democrats elected Buchanan; Demo- 
crats 174 electoral votes; Republicans 74, 
all Northern; and the Know-No things, 
combined with a remnant of Whigs, 8. 

The work of sectionalism was nearly 
completed. 

The extremes to which some of the South- 
ern people now resorted show the madness of 
the times. They encouraged filibustering 
expeditions to capture Cuba and Nicaragua. 
These wild ventures were absolutely inde- 
fensible. They had no official sanction and 
were only spontaneous movements, but they 
met with favor from the Southern public, 
the outgrowth of a feeling that, if these 
countries should be captured and annexed 
as slave States, the South could the better, 
by their aid, defend its rights in the Union. 
The Wanderer and one or two other vessels, 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

contrary to the laws of the United States, 
imported slaves from Africa, and when the 
participants were, some of them, indicted, 
Southern juries absolutely refused to con- 
vict. 

"Judgment had fled to brutish beasts, 
And men had lost their reason." 

When later the Southern States had se- 
ceded and formed a government of their 
own their constitution absolutely prohibited 
the slave traffic. 



146 



CHAPTER VIII 

INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND 
FREEDOM 

THAT it was possible for slave States 
and free States to coexist under our 
Federal Constitution was the belief of its 
framers and of most of our people down to 
1861. The first to announce the absolute 
impossibility of such coexistence seems to 
have been William Lloyd Garrison. In 
1840, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the Essex 
County Anti-Slavery Society adopted this 
resolution, offered by him: 

"That freedom and slavery are natural 
and irreconcilable enemies; that it is morally 
impossible for them to endure together in 
the same nation, and that the existence of 
the one can only be secured by the destruc- 
tion of the other." ^ 

Garrison's remedy was disunion. Near 
that time his paper's motto was "No Union 
with Slave-Holders." 

' Garrison's "Garrison." 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

The next to announce the idea of the in- 
compatibility of slave States and free States 
seems to have been one who did not dream 
of disunion. No such thought was in the 
mind of Abraham Lincoln when, in a speech 
at Springfield, Illinois, June 15, 1858, he 
said: 

'^ A house divided against itself cannot stand. 
I believe this government cannot endure perma- 
nently half slave and half free. I do not ex- 
pect the U7iion to be divided. It will become 
one thing or the other. Either the opponents 
of slavery will arrest the further spread of 
it, and place it where the public mind will 
rest in the belief that it is in the course of 
ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push 
it forward until it shall become alike lawful 
in all the States — old as well as new — North 
as well as South." 

When the Southerners read that state- 
ment they concluded that, as Mr. Lincoln 
knew very well that the South could not, if 
it would, force slavery on the North, he 
was announcing the intention of his party 
to place slavery "in course of ultimate ex- 
tinction," constitution or no constitution. 

Senator Seward, at Rochester, New York, 
148 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

some weeks later, reannounced the doctrine, 
declaring that the contest was "an irre- 
pressible conflict between opposing and en- 
during forces; and it means that the United 
States must and will, sooner or later, become 
either an entirely slave-holding nation or 
entirely a free labor nation." 

The utterances of Lincoln and Seward 
were distinctly radical. The question was, 
would this radical idea ultimately dominate 
the Republican party.? 

Less than eighteen months after the an- 
nouncement in 1858 of the doctrine of the 
"irrepressible conflict," John Brown raided 
Virginia to incite insurrections. With a few 
followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the 
slaves who were to join him, he captured the 
United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry. 
Only a few slaves came to him and, after a 
brief struggle, with some bloodshed. Brown 
was captured, tried by a jury, and hanged. 

In the South the excitement was intense; 
the horror and indignation in that section 
it is impossible to describe. Brown was al- 
ready well known to the public. He was 
not a lunatic. Not long before this, in Kan- 
sas, "at the head of a small group of men, 
149 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

including two of his sons and a son-in-law, 
he went at night down Pottowattamie 
Creek, stopping at three houses. The men 
who lived in them were well known pro- 
slavery men ; they seem to have been rough 
characters; their most specific offence (ac- 
cording to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and 
eulogist) was the driving from his home, by 
violent threats, of an inoffensive old man. 
John Brown and his party went down the 
creek, called at one after the other of three 
houses, took five men away from their 
wives and children, and deliberately shot 
one and hacked the others to death with 
swords."^ 

Quite a number of people, some of them 
men of eminence in the North, aided Brown 
in his enterprise. Among the men of repute 
were Gerrit Smith, a former candidate for 
the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr. 
Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
of Boston, who were all members of a "se- 
cret committee to collect money and arms 
for the expedition." With them was F. S. 
Sanborn, who has since the war vauntingly 

' "The Negro and the Nation," George Spring Merriam, 
p. 120. 

150 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

revealed the scheme in his "Life of John 
Brown." ^ 

Sanborn intimates that Henry Wilson, 
subsequently vice-president, was more or 
less privy to the design.^ At various places 
in the North church bells were tolled on 
the day of John Brown's execution; meet- 
ings were held and orators extolled him as 
a martyr. Emerson, the greatest thinker in 
all that region, declared that if John Brown 
was hanged he would glorify the gallows as 
Jesus glorified the cross; and now many 
Southern men who loved the Union reluc- 
tantly concluded that separation was in- 
evitable. John Bell, of Tennessee, Union 
candidate for President in i860, is said to 
have cried like a child when he heard of 
Brown's raid. 

The great body of the Northern people 
condemned John Brown's expedition with- 
out stint. Edward Everett, voicing the 
opinion of all who were really conservative, 
said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil 
Hall, that its design was to "let loose the 
hell hounds of a servile insurrection, and to 
bring on a struggle which, for magnitude, 

' Sanborn's "Life of John Brown," p. 466. " lb., p. 515. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

atrocity, and horror, would have stood alone 
in the history of the world." 

But they who had been preaching the 
"irrepressible conflict," they whom public 
opinion might hold responsible, did not feel 
precisely as Mr. Everett did. They were 
concerned about political consequences, as 
appears from a letter written somewhat 
later during the State canvass in New York 
by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. 
Horace Greeley afterward proved himself 
in many ways a broad-minded, magnani- 
mous man, but now he wrote: "Do not be 
downhearted about the old John Brown 
business. Its present eff^ect is bad and throws 
a heavy load on us in this State . . . but 
the ultimate effect is to be good. . . . It will 
drive the slave power to nezv outrages. . . . It 
presses on the irrepressible conflict. ^^^ 

The fact that such a man as Horace Gree- 
ley was taking comfort because that outrage 
would "drive the slave power to new out- 
rages"" throws a strong side-light on the 
tactics of the anti-slavery leaders. They 
were following Garrison. Garrison, the 

' " History of United States," Rhodes, vol. I. 
* Channing. 

152 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

father of the Abolitionists, had begun his 
campaign against slave-holders by "ex- 
hausting upon them the vocabulary of 
abuse," and he had shown "a genius for 
infuriating his antagonists." ^ The new 
party — his successor and beneficiary, was 
now felicitating itself that ultimate good 
would come, even from the John Brown 
raid. It would further their policy of 
''driving the slave power to new outrages. ^^ 

People at the North, conservatives and 
all, held their breath for a time after Har- 
per's Ferry. Then the crusade went on, in 
the press, on the rostrum, and from the 
pulpit, with as much virulence as ever. No 
assertion was too extravagant for belief, i^ 
provided only its tendency was to disparage 
the Southern white man or win sympathy 
for the negro. From the noted "Brown- 
low and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphia 
(Lippincott), we take the following as a 
specimen of the abuse a portion of the 
Northern press was then heaping on the 
Southern people. Brownlow quotes from the 
New York Independent of November, 1856: 

"The mass of the population of the At- 

»Hart. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

lantic Coast of the slave region of the South 
are descended from the transported con- 
victs and outcasts of Great Britain. . . . 
Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aris- 
tocracy of the South! Peerless first families 
of Virginia and Carolina! . . . Progeny of 
the highwaymen, and horse-thieves and 
sheep-stealers, and pick-pockets of Old 
England!" 

The South was not to be outdone, and 
here was a retort from De Bow's Review, 
July, 1858: 

"The basis, framework, and controlling 
influence of Northern sentiment is Puri- 
tanism — the old Roundhead, rebel refuse of 
England, which . . . has ever been an un- 
ruly sect of Pharisees . . . the worst bigots 
on earth and the meanest of tyrants when 
they have the power to exercise it."^ 

And the non-slave-holder of the South 
did not escape from the pitiless pelting of 
the storm. He was sustaining the slave- 
holder, and this was not only an offence 
but a puzzle. 

It became quite common in the North for 
anti-slavery writers to classify the non-slave- 

• Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery," p. 303. 

154 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

holding agricultural classes of the South as 
"poor whites," thus distinguishing them 
from the slave-holders; and the idea is cur- 
rent even now in that section that as a class 
the lordly slave-holder despised his poor 
white fellow-citizen. The average non- 
slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether 
farming for himself or for others, was a type 
of man that no one who knew him, least of 
all the Southern slave-holder, his neighbor 
and political ally, could despise. Educated 
and uneducated, these people were inde- 
pendent voters and honest jurors, the very 
backbone of Southern State governments 
that always will be notable in history for 
efficiency, purity, and economy. 

This class of voters, however, came in for 
much abuse in the literature of the crusade. 
They were all lumped together as "poor 
whites," sometimes as "poor white trash," 
and the belief was inculcated that their im- 
perious slave-holding neighbors applied that 
term to them. "Poor white trash," on its 
face, is "nigger talk," caught up, doubtless, 
from Southern negro barbers and bootblacks, 
and used by writers who, from information 
thus derived, pictured Southern society. 
155 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

This is a sample of the numerous errors 
that crept into the literature of one section 
of our Union about social conditions in the 
other during that memorable sectional con- 
troversy. It is on a par with the idea that 
prevailed, in some quarters in the South, 
that the Yankee cared for nothing but 
money, and would not fight even for that. 

Southerners were practically all of the old 
British stock. Homogeneity, common mem- 
ories of the wars of the Revolution, of 1812, 
and with Mexico, and Fourth of July cele- 
brations, all tended to bind together strong- 
ly the Southern slave-holder and non-slave- 
holder. 

There were, of course, many classes of 
non-slave-holders — the thrifty farmer, the 
unthrifty, and the laborer who worked for 
hire, but more frequently for "shares of the 
crop." Then there were others — the inhabi- 
tants of the "sand-hills" and the mountain 
regions. These people were, as a rule, very 
shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still 
too proud to beg, as the very poor usually 
do in other countries. The mountaineers 
were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it 
was from the mountains of Tennessee, Ala- 
156 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

bama, etc., that the Union armies gathered 
many recruits. This was not, as is often 
stated, because mountaineers love Hberty 
better than others, but because these moun- 
taineers never came into contact with either 
master or slave. The crusade against slav- 
ery, therefore, did not threaten to affect 
their personal status. 

There were very few public schools in the 
South, but in the cities and towns there were 
academies and high-schools, and the country 
was dotted with "old field schools," most of 
them not good, but sufficient to train those 
who became efficient leaders in social, re- 
ligious, and political circles. 

The wonderful progress made by the 
Southern white man during the last thirty- 
five years is by no means all due to the abo- 
lition of slavery. Labor, it is true, is held 
in higher esteem. This is a great gain, but 
still more is due to improved transporta- 
tion, to better prices for timber and cotton, 
to commercial fertilizers, and an awakening 
interest in education. The South is also 
developing its mineral resources and is now 
rapidly forging to the front. The white 
man is making more cotton than the negro. 
157 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

But the very strongest bond that bound 
together the Southern slave-holder and non- 
slave-holder was the pride of caste. Every 
white man was a freeman; he belonged to 
the superior, the dominant race. 

Edmund Burke, England's philosopher- 
statesman, in his speech on "Conciliation 
with America" at the beginning of our Rev- 
olution, complimented in high terms the 
spirit of liberty among the dissenting pro- 
testants of New England. Then, alluding to 
the hopes indulged in by some gentlemen, 
that the Southern colonies would be loyal 
to Great Britain because the Church of 
England had there a large establishment, 
he said: "It is certainly true. There is, 
however, a circumstance attending these 
colonies which in my opinion fully counter- 
balances this difference, and makes the 
spirit of liberty still more high and haughty 
than in those to the Northward. It is, that 
in Virginia and Carolina they have a vast 
multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, 
in any part of the world, those who are free 
are by far the most proud and jealous of their 
freedom. Freedom with them is not only an 
enjoyment, but a kind o^ rank and privilege'' 
158 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

The privilege of belonging to the superior 
race and of being free was a bond that tied 
all Southern whites together, and it was 
infinitely strengthened by a crusade that 
seemed, from a Southern stand-point, to 
have for its purpose the levelling of all dis- 
tinctions between the white man and the 
slave hard by. 

Socially, there were classes in the South 
as there are everywhere. The controlling 
class consisted of professional men, lawyers, 
physicians, teachers, and high-class mer- 
chants (though the merchant prince was 
unknown), and slave-holders. Slave-holders 
were, of course, divided into classes, chiefly 
two: those who had acquired culture and 
breeding from slave-holding ancestors, and 
those who had little culture or breeding, 
principally the newly rich. It was the 
former class that gave tone to Southern 
society. The performance of duty always 
ennobles, and this is especially true of duty 
done by superiors to inferiors. The master 
and mistress of a slave establishment were 
responsible for the moral and material wel- 
fare of their dependents. When they appre- 
ciated and fulfilled their responsibilities, as 
159 



y^ 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the best families usually did, there was found 
what was called the Southern aristocracy. 
The habit of command, assured position, and 
high ideals, coming down, as these often did, 
with family traditions, gave these favored 
people ease and grace, and they were social 
favorites, both in the North and Europe. 
At home they dispensed a hospitality that 
made the South famous. They were ex- 
emplars, giving tone to society, and it was 
notable that breeding and culture, and not 
wealth, gave tone to Southern society. 
There was perhaps in Virginia and South 
Carolina an aristocracy that was somewhat 
more exclusive than elsewhere. 

Slavery was at its worst when masters 
were not equal to their responsibilities, for 
want of either culture or Christian feeling, 
or both, as also when, as was now and then 
the case, a brutal overseer was in charge of 
a plantation far away from the eye of the 
owner. 

The influence of the slave-holder and his 
lavish hospitality did not make for thrift 
among his less fortunate brethren; it made 
perhaps for prodigality, but it also made for 
a high sense of honor among slave-holders 
1 60 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

and non-slave-holders as well. Both slave- 
holders and non-slave-holders were ex- 
tremely punctilious. Money did not count 
where honor was concerned, and Southern- 
ers do well to be proud of the record in this 
respect that has been made by their states- 
men. 

Among the more cultured classes in the 
period here treated of, the duel prevailed, a 
practice now very properly condemned. But 
it made for a high sense of honor. Dema- 
gogues were not common when a false state- 
ment on "the stump" was apt to result in 
a mortal combat. 

Among the less cultured classes insult 
was answered with a blow of the fist. Fisti- 
cuffs, too, were quite common to ascertain 
who was the "best man" in a community 
or county. The rules were not according to 
the Marquis of Queensbury, but they al- 
ways secured "fair play."^ 

This combative spirit of Southerners was 
undoubtedly a result of the spirit of caste 
that came from slavery. Sometimes it was 

' For the humorous side of life in the South in the old day, 
see "Simon Suggs," J. J. Hooper; "Georgia Scenes," Judge 
Longstreet, and "Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi," by 
Baldwin. 

i6i 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

unduly exhibited in Congress during the 
controversy over slavery and State's rights, 
and excited Southerners occasionally sub- 
jected themselves to the charge of arrogance. 

One of the great evils of slavery was that, 
as a rule, neither the slave-holder nor the 
non-slave-holder properly appreciated the 
dignity of labor. A witty student at a 
Southern university said that his chief ob- 
jection to college life was that he could not 
have a negro to learn his lessons for him. 
The slave-holder quite generally disdained 
manual labor, and the non-slave-holder was 
also inclined to deprecate the necessity that 
compelled him to work. 

The sudden abolition of slavery was the 
ruin of thousands of innocent families — a 
loss for which there was no recompense. 
But for the South at large, and especially 
to this generation, it is a blessing that all 
classes have come to see, that to labor and 
to be useful is not only a duty, but a privi- 
lege. 

Political conditions. North and South, 
differed widely. The North was the major- 
ity section. Its majority could protect its 
rights; recourse to the limitations of the 
162 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Federal Constitution was seldom necessary. 
The South, a minority section, with a devo- 
tion that never failed, held high the "Con- 
stitution of the fathers, the palladium" of 
its rights. To one section the Constitution 
was the bond of a Federal Union that was 
the security for interstate commerce and 
national prosperity; to the other it was a 
guaranty of peace abroad and local self- 
government at home. In the one section 
the brightest minds were for the most part 
engaged in business or in literary pursuits; 
in the other, politics absorbed much of its 
talent. In the North the staple of political 
discussion was usually some business or 
moral question, while in the South the po- 
litical arena was a great school in which the 
masses were not only educated in the his- 
tory of the formation of the Constitution, 
but taught an affectionate regard for that 
instrument as a revered "gift from the 
fathers" and the only safeguard of American 
liberty. Joint political discussions, which 
were common between the ablest men of 
opposing parties, were always numerously 
attended, and the Federal Constitution was 
an unfailing topic. The result was, an 
163 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

amount of political information in the aver- 
age Confederate soldier that the average 
Union soldier in his business training had 
never acquired, and a devotion of the South- 
erner to the Constitution of his country 
which even the ablest historians of to-day 
have failed to comprehend. 

It is often stated, as if it were an important 
fact in the consideration of the great anti- 
slavery crusade, that not many of the Abo- 
litionists were as radical as Garrison, and 
that of the anti-slavery voters very few 
favored social equality between whites and 
blacks. Southerners did not stop to make 
distinctions like these. They saw the Aboli- 
tionists advocating mixed schools and favor- 
ing laws authorizing mixed marriages; saw 
them practising social equality; saw the 
general trend in that direction; and so from 
its very beginning the Republican party, 
which had absorbed the Abolitionists, was 
dubbed. North and South, the *' Black Re- 
publican" party. 

The whites of the South believed that the 

triumph of the "Black Republican" party, 

as they called it, would be ultimately the 

triumph of its most radical elements. Judge 

164 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Reagan, of Texas, United States congress- 
man in 1 860-6 1, Confederate Postmaster- 
General, later United States senator, and 
always until i860 an avowed friend of the 
Union, in his farewell speech to the Con- 
gress of the United States in January, 1861, 
gave expression to this idea when he said: 

"And now you tender to us the inhuman 
alternative of unconditional submission to 
Republican rule on abolition principles^ and 
ultimately to free negro equality, and a govern- 
ment of mongrels, or a war of races on the 
one hand, and on the other, secession and a 
bloody and desolating civil war." ^ 

Judge Reagan was expressing in Congress 
the opinion that animated the Confederate 
soldier in the war that was to follow seces- 
sion, an opinion the ex-Confederate did not 
see much reason to change when the era of 
Reconstruction had been reached, and the 
ballot had been given to every negro, while 
the leading whites were disfranchised. 

In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, of North 
Carolina, wrote a notable book to show that 
slavery was a curse to the South, and espe- 
cially to the non-slave-holders. It was an 

* "Memoirs of John H. Reagan," p. 261. 
165 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

appeal to the latter to become Abolition- 
ists. His arguments availed nothing; back 
of his book was the Republican party, 
now planting itself, as Garrison had planted 
himself, on an extract from the first sentence 
of the Declaration of Independence, "all 
men are created equal." The Republican 
contention was, in platforms and speeches, 
that the Declaration of Independence cov- 
ered negroes as well as whites,^ and South- 
ern whites, nearly all of Revolutionary stock, 
resented the idea. They rebelled at the sug- 
gestion that the signers, every one of whom, 
save possibly those from Massachusetts, 
represented slave-holding constituents, in- 
tended to say that the negroes then in the 
colonies were the equals of the whites. If 
so, why were these negroes kept in slavery, 
and why were they not immediately given 
the right to vote, to sit on juries, to be edu- 
cated, and to intermarry with the whites? 
All this, the Southerners said, as, indeed, 
did many Northerners also, was to be the 
logical outcome of the Republican doctrine, 
that negroes and whites were equals. It is 

* Mr. Lincoln took that position in his great speech at Chicago, 
in 1858, when beginning his campaign for the senatorship. 

166 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

passing strange that modern historians so 
often have failed to note that this thought 
was in the minds of all the opponents of the 
Republican party from the day of its birth- 
North and South it was called the "Black 
Republican" party. Douglas, in his de- 
bate with Lincoln, gave it that name and 
stood by it. In his speech at Jonesboro, 
Illinois, September 15, 1858, he charges 
the Republicans with advocating "negro 
citizenship and negro equality, putting the 
white man and the negro on the same basis 
under the law." ^ 

John C. Calhoun, in a memorial to the 
Southern people in 1849, signed by many 
other congressmen, had said that Northern 
fanaticism would not stop at emancipation. 
"Another step would be taken to raise them 
[the negroes] to a political and social equality 
with their former owners, by giving them 
the right of voting and holding public office 
under the Federal Government. . . . But 
when raised to an equality they would 
become the fast political associates of the 
North, acting and voting with them on all 
questions, and by this perfect union be- 

' Lincoln, "Complete Works," vol. IV, p. 9, 
167 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

tween them holding the South in complete 
subjection. The blacks and the profligate 
whites that might finite with them would be- 
come the principal recipients of Federal 
patronage, and would, in consequence, be 
raised above the whites of the South in the 
social and political scale. We would, in a 
word, change conditions with them, a deg- 
radation greater than has as yet fallen to the 
lot of a free and enlightened peopled ^ 

In the light of Reconstruction, this was 
prophecy. 

These words, once heard by a Southern 
white man, of course sank into his heart. 
They could never have been forgotten. The 
argument of Helper fell on deaf ears. If 
Helper had come with the promise (and an 
assurance of its fulfilment) that the negroes, 
when emancipated, would be sent to Liberia, 
or elsewhere out of the country^ the South 
would have become Republicanized at once. 
Even if the slave-holder had been unwill- 
ing, the Southern non-slave-holder, with his 
three, and often five, to one majority, would 
have seen to it. 

And it is not too much to say that if the 

' "Calhoun's Works," vol. VI, p. 311. 
168 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

negro had been, as the AboHtionists and 
ultimately many Republicans contended he 
was, the equal of the white man, Liberia 
would have been a success. What a glorious 
consummation of the dreams of statesmen 
and philanthropists that would have been! 
Abolitionists, unable to frustrate their 
scheme, and the American negro, profiting 
by the civilization here received from con- 
tact with the white man, building by his 
own energy happy homes for himself and 
his kinsmen, and enjoying the blessings of 
a great government of his own, in his own 
great continent! 

Africa with its vast resources is a prize 
that all Europe is now contending for. It 
is believed to be adapted even to white men. 
Most assuredly, for the negro Liberia offered 
far better opportunities than did the rocky 
coast of New England to the white men who 
settled it. Liberia had been carefully se- 
lected as a desirable part of Africa. It was 
an unequalled group of statesmen and phi- 
lanthropists that had planted the colony; 
they provided for it and set it on its feet. 
But it failed; failed just for the same rea- 
son that prevented the aboriginal African 
169 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

from catching on to the civihzation that be- 
gan to develop thousands of years ago, close 
by his side on the borders of the Mediter- 
ranean; failed for the same reason that 
Hayti, now free for a century, has failed. 
The failure of the plan of the American Col- 
onization Society to repatriate the American 
negro in Africa was due primarily to the in- 
capacity of the negro. 

A very complete and convincing story 
will be found in an article entitled "Liberia, 
an Example of Negro Self-Government,"^ 
by Miss Agnes P. Mahony, for five years a 
missionary in that country. The author of 
the article was a sympathizing friend. She 
says: "In 1847 the colony was considered 
healthy enough to stand alone. ... So our 
flag was lowered on the African continent, 
and the protectors of the colony retired, 
leaving the people to govern the country 
in their own way." Then she recites that 
in order to test their capacity for self-gov- 
ernment their constitution (1847) provided 
that no white man should hold property 
in the country; and to this Miss Mahony 
traces the failure that followed. When she 

' Independent, 1906. 
170 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

wrote, the Liberian negroes, for fifty-nine 
years under the protectorship of the United 
States, had been troubled by no foreign 
enemy; yet their failure was complete — 
not a foot of railroad, no cable communi- 
cation with foreign countries, no telegraphic 
communication with the interior, etc. Still 
the devoted missionary thinks that Liberia 
might prosper, if it could but have ''the en- 
couraging example of and contact with the 
right kind of white men.'" 

The presidential campaign of i860 was 
very exciting. There were four tickets in 
the field, Douglas and Johnson, Democrats; 
Breckenridge and Lane, Democrats; Lincoln 
and Hamlin, Republicans, and Bell and 
Everett representing the "Constitutional 
Union" party. As the election approached 
it became apparent that the Republicans 
were leading, and far-seeing men, like Sam- 
uel J. Tilden, of New York, became much 
alarmed for fear that the election of Lincoln 
would bring about secession in the South. 
Mr. Tilden, in view of the danger that to him 
was apparent, wrote, shortly before the elec- 
tion, to William Kent, of New York City, 
171 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

an open letter in which he earnestly urged 
a combination in New York State of the 
supporters of other candidates, in order to 
defeat Abraham Lincoln. The letter was 
so alarming that some of Tilden's friends 
thought he had lost his balance; but now 
that letter is regarded as a remarkable proof 
of his sagacity. In the first volume of Mr. 
Tilden's "Life and Letters," by Bigelow, 
appears an "Appreciation" by James C. 
Carter and an analysis of this letter. Of 
this the following is a brief abstract: Mr. 
Tilden first argued that two strictly sec- 
tional parties, arrayed upon the question of 
destroying an institution which one of them, 
not unnaturally, regarded as essential to 
self-existence, would bring war. 

Then Mr. Tilden further said that if the 
Republican party should be successful in 
establishing its dominion over the South, 
the national government in the Southern 
States would cease to be self-government 
and become a government of one people 
over a distinct people, a thing impossible 
with our race, except as a consequence of a 
successful war, and even then incompatible 
with our democratic institutions. He also 
172 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

said: **I assert that a controversy between 
powerful communities, organized into gov- 
ernments, of a nature like that which now 
divides the North and South, can be settled 
only by convention or by war." 

And again: "A condition of parties in 
which the Federative Government shall be 
carried on by a party, having no affiliations 
in the Southern States, is impossible to con- 
tinue. Such a government would be out of 
all relations to those States. It would have 
neither the nerves of sensation, which con- 
vey intelligence to the intellect of the body 
politic, nor the ligaments and muscles, 
which hold its parts together and move them 
in harmony. It would be in substance the 
government of one people by another peo- 
ple. That system will not do for our race." 

Mr. Tilden, when he spoke of "two sec- 
tional parties arrayed upon the question of 
destroying an institution," m., slavery, saw 
the situation exactly as the South did. To 
prove that the Republican party was look- 
ing to the ultimate destruction of the insti- 
tution, Mr. Tilden cited the leadership of 
Chase and his speeches in which he was pro- 
pounding the higher law theory; asserting 
173 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

that the conflict was "irrepressible"; sug- 
gesting the power of the North to amend 
the Constitution, etc. 

The South noted this, and it regarded, not 
the platform, but the record of the Repub- 
Hcan party and of the statesmen the party 
was following. 

Long before i860, that great American 
scholar, George Ticknor, saw the dilemma 
in which the North was involving itself 
by its concern over slavery in the South, 
and he thus stated it, in a letter to his 
friend, William Ellery Channing, April 30, 
1842:^ 

"On the subject of our relations with 
the South and its slavery, we must — as I 
have always thought — do one of two things ; 
either keep honestly the bargain of the Con- 
stitution as it shall be interpreted by the 
authorities — of which the Supreme Court of 
the United States is the chief and safest — 
or declare honestly that we can no longer 
in our conscience consent to keep it, and 
break it." 

The North had failed to "keep honestly 
the bargain of the Constitution" by faith- 

' Life and Letters and Journals of George Ticknor. 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

fully delivering fugitive slaves and leaving 
the question of slavery to be dealt with by 
the States in which it existed, and was 
now, in i860, upon the other horn of the 
dilemma — repudiating and denouncing a de- 
cision of the Supreme Court, which, as Mr. 
Ticknor had said, was the "chief and safest 
authority." But during that campaign of 
i860 very many, perhaps a majority of the 
Republican voters, failed to realize what 
their party was standing for. Indeed, down 
to this day the members of that organiza- 
tion, taught as they have been, indignantly 
deny that a vote for Lincoln and Hamlin in 
i860 looked to an interference with slavery 
in the States. 

But now Professor Emerson David Fite, 
of Yale University, sees in 191 1 what was 
the underlying hope, and consequently the 
ultimate aim, of the Republican party in 
i860, exactly as the South saw it then. In 
a powerful summing up of more evidence 
than there is room to recite here, he says: 
"The testimony of the Democracy and of 
the leaders of the Republican party accords 
well with the evidence of daily events in 
revealing Republican aggression. The party 
175 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

hoped to destroy slavery, and this was some- 
thing new in a large political organization.'' ^ 

That this party, when it should ultimately 
come into full power, would, to carry out 
the purpose which Professor Fite now sees, 
ignore the Federal Constitution was, in 
i860, evident to Southerners from the fol- 
lowing facts: 

In 1 84 1 the governor of Virginia de- 
manded of the governor of New York the 
extradition of two men indicted in Virginia 
for enticing away slaves from their mas- 
ters. Governor Seward, of New York, re- 
fused the demand, on the ground that no 
such offence existed in New York. This 
case did not go to the courts, but in i860 
the governor of Kentucky made a similar 
demand in a like case on the governor of 
Ohio, who placed his refusal on the same 
grounds as had Governor Seward in the 
former case. The Supreme Court of the 
United States in this case decided that the 
governor of Ohio, in refusing to deliver up 
the fugitive, was violating the Constitution. 
The court further said : 

"If the governor of Ohio refuses to dis- 

' "The Presidential Campaign of i860," p. 195, Fite, 191 1. 
176 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

charge this duty there is no power delegated to 
the general government^ either through the ju- 
dicial department or any other department, 
to use any coercive means to compel him." ^ 

If these two governors had defied the 
Federal Constitution, so had eleven State 
legislatures. From 1854 to i860, inclu- 
sive, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, 
Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wiscon- 
sin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, had 
all passed new "personal liberty laws" to 
abrogate the new fugitive slave law of 1850. 

Of these laws Professor Alexander John- 
ston said: 

"There is absolutely no excuse for the 
personal liberty laws. If the rendition of 
fugitive slaves was a federal obligation, the 
personal liberty laws were flat disobedience 
to the law; if the obligation was upon the 
States, they were a gross breach of good 
faith, for they were intended and operated 
to prevent rendition; and, in either case, 
they were in violation of the Constitution." ^ 

And now came the State of Wisconsin. 
Its Supreme Court intervened and took from 

* "Virginia's Attitude on Slavery and Secession," Mumford, 
pp. 211-12. 
'Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopaedia," vol. Ill, p. 163. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the hands of the federal authorities an al- 
leged fugitive slave. The Supreme Court of 
the United States reversed the case and or- 
dered the slave back into the custody of the 
United States marshal;^ and thereupon the 
General Assembly of Wisconsin expressly re- 
pudiated the authority of the United States 
Supreme Court. The Wisconsin assembly 
asserted its right to nullify the Federal law, 
basing its action on the Kentucky Resolu- 
tions of 1798 — a recrudescence of a doctrine 
long since abandoned even in the South. 

In reality all this defiance of the Consti- 
tution of the United States by State execu- 
tives, State legislatures, and a State court, 
was on the ground that whatever was dic- 
tated by conscience to these officials was a 
"higher law than the Constitution of the 
United States"; and modern historians 
recognize, as Tilden did, the leadership of 
the statesman who in 1850 announced that 
startling doctrine. It is Alexander Johnston 
who says, " Seward's speeches in the Senate 
made him the leader of the Republican 
party from its first organization."' 

' Ableman v. Booth, 21 How. 

^Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopaedia," vol. Ill, p. 
707. 

178 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

To the minds of Southerners it seemed 
clear that if the Southern States desired to 
preserve for themselves the Constitution of the 
fathers, they must secede and set it up over a 
government of their own. This eleven of 
these States did. Many of them were re- 
luctant to take the step; all their people 
had loved the old Union, but they passed 
their ordinances of secession, united as the 
Confederate States of America, and their 
officials took an oath to maintain inviolate 
the old Constitution, which, with unimpor- 
tant changes in it, they had adopted. 

The new government sent delegates to 
ask that the separation should be peaceful. 
The application was denied and the war 
followed. Attempts to secede were made 
in Kentucky and Missouri. In neither of 
these States did the seceders get full control. 
They were represented, however, in the Con- 
federate Congress by senators and represent- 
atives elected by the troops from those 
States that were serving in the Confederate 
army. 



179 



CHAPTER IX 
FOUR YEARS OF WAR 

THE bitter fruits of anti-slavery agita- 
tion were secession and four years 
of bloody war. The Federal Government 
waged war to coerce the seceding States to 
remain in the Union. With the North it 
was a war for the Union; the South was 
fighting for independence — denominated by 
Northern writers as "the Civil War." It 
was in reality a war between the eleven 
States which had seceded, as autonomous 
States, and were fighting for independence, 
as the Confederate States of America, against 
the other twenty-two States, which, as the 
United States of America, fought against se- 
cession and for the Union of all the States. 
It is true the States remaining in the Union 
had with them the army and the navy 
and the old government, but that govern- 
ment could not, and did not, exercise its 
functions within the borders of the seceded 
States until by force of arms in the war 
1 80 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

that was now waged it had conquered a 
control. It was a war between the States 
for such control; for independence on the 
one hand, and for the Union on the other. 
It was not, save in exceptional cases, a war 
between neighbor and neighbor; it was a war 
between States as entities, and therefore 
not properly a civil war. The result of the 
war did not change the principles upon 
which it was fought, though it did decide 
finally the issues that were involved, the 
right of secession primarily, and slavery inci- 
dentally. 

Jefferson Davis, afterward the much- 
loved President of the Confederacy, in his 
farewell speech in the United States Senate, 
March 21, 1861, thus stated the case of the 
South: "Then, senators, we recur to the 
compact which binds us together. We re- 
cur to the principles upon which this gov- 
ernment was founded, and when you deny 
them, and when you deny to us the right 
to withdraw from a Union which thus per- 
verted threatens to he destructive of our rights, 
we hut tread in the path of our fathers when 
we proclaim our independence and take the 
hazard. This is done not in hostility to 
181 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

others, not to injure any section of our coun- 
try, not even for our own pecuniary benefit^ 
but from the high and solemn motive of defend- 
ing and protecting the rights we inherited and 
which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our 
children!' 

Southerners were, as Mr. Davis under- 
stood it, treading in the path of their fathers 
when they proclaimed their independence 
and fought for the right of self-government. 

Professor Fite, of Yale, justifies secession 
on the following ground : 

"In the last analysis the one complete 
justification of secession was the necessity 
of saving the vast property of slavery from 
destruction; secession was a commercial 
necessity designed to make those billions se- 
cure from outside interference. Viewed in 
this light, secession was right, for any peo- 
ple, prompted by the commonest motives 
of self-defence and wjth no moral scruples 
against slavery, would have followed the 
same course. The present generation of 
Northerners, born and reared after the war, 
must shake off their inherited political pas- 
sions and prejudices and pronounce the ver- 
dict of justification for the South. Believ- 
182 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

ing slavery to be right, it was the duty of 
the South to defend it. It is time that the 
words 'traitors,' 'conspirators,' 'rebels,' and 
'rebellion' be discarded."^ 

These words of Professor Fite will waken 
a responsive echo in the hearts of Southern- 
ers, but Southerners place, and their fathers 
planted, themselves on higher ground than 
commercial considerations. The Confeder- 
ates were defending their inherited right of- 
local self-government and the Federal Con- 
stitution that secured it. It was for these 
rights that, as Mr. Davis had said, they were 
willing to follozv the path their fathers trod. 

The preservation of the Union the North 
was fighting for, was a noble motive; it 
looked to the future greatness and glory 
of the republic; but devotion to the Union 
had been a growth, the product largely of a 
single generation ; the devotion of the South 
to the right of local self-government was 
an older and deeper conviction ; it had been 
bred in the bone for three generations; it 
dated from Bunker Hill and Valley Forge 
and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave- 

1 "The Presidential Campaign of i860," Emerson David Fite, 
191 1, introductory chapter. 

183 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

holders of the South were to the slave- 
holders, of the same British stock, and with 
the same traditions, blood kinsmen as they 
were, they might not have been willing to 
dare all and do all for the protection of prop- 
erty in which they were not interested ; but 
they were ready to, and they did, wage a 
death struggle to maintain against a hostile 
sectional majorit>% their inherited right to 
govern themselves in their own way. Added 
to this was the ever-present conviction of 
Southerners all, that they were battling not 
only for the supremacy of their race but for 
the preservation of their homes. There was 
a little ditty quite prevalent in the Army of 
Northern Virginia, of which nothing is now 
remembered except the refrain, but that of 
itself speaks volumes. It ran: 

"Do you belong to the rebel band 
Fighting for your home?" 

Northerners had, most of them, convinced 
themselves that the South would never 
dare to secede. The danger of servile insur- 
rections, if nothing else, would prevent it.^ 

'See Fite, "Campaign of i860," passim, and es- 
pecially speech of Schurz, p. 244 et seq. 

184 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Many Southerners, on the other hand, could 
not see how, under the Constitution, the 
North could venture on coercion. 

But to the South the greatest surprise fur- 
nished by the events of that era has been 
Abraham Lincoln — as he appears now in 
the light of history. What, in the minds of 
Southerners, fixed his status personally, dur- 
ing the canvass of i860, was the statement 
he had made in his speech at Chicago, pre- 
liminary to his great debate with Douglas in 
1858, that the Union could not "continue to 
exist half slave and half free." And he was 
now the candidate of the "Black Republi- 
can" party, a party that was denouncing a 
decision of the Supreme Court; that, in 
nearly every State in the North, had nulli- 
fied the fugitive slave law, and that stood 
for "negro equality," as the South termed it. 

There were other statements by Mr. Lin- 
coln in that debate with Douglas that the 
South has had especial reason to take note 
of since the period of Reconstruction. At 
Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he 
said: "There is a physical difference be- 
tween the white and black races which, I 
believe, will forever forbid the t\vo races liv- 
185 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

ing together on terms of social and political 
equality, and, inasmuch as they can not so 
live, while they do live together there must be 
the position of superior and inferior; and /, 
as much as any other man, am in favor of 
having that position assigned to the white ma?i." 

The new Confederacy took the Constitu- 
tion of the United States, so modified as to 
make it read plainly as Jefferson had ex- 
pounded it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 
1798. Other changes were slight. The presi- 
dential term was extended to six years and 
the President was not to be re-eligible. The 
slave trade was prohibited and Congress 
was authorized to forbid the introduction 
of slaves from the old Union. 

Abraham Lincoln became President, with 
a fixed resolve to preserve the Union but 
with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the 
war for the Union been as successful as he 
hoped it would be, slavery would not have 
been abolished by any act of his. It is clear 
that, when inaugurated, he had not changed 
his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor 
those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on 
October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: 
*'When our Southern brethren tell us they 
186 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

are no more responsible for slavery than we 
are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said 
the institution exists and it is very difficult 
to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can 
understand and appreciate the saying. I 
will surely not blame them for not doing 
what'I should not know how to do myself. 
If all earthly power were given me, I should 
not know what to do as to the institution. 
My first impulse would be to free all the 
slaves and send them to Liberia, their na- 
tive land." 

This, he said, it was impracticable to do, 
at least suddenly, and then proceeded: "To 
free them all and keep them among us as 
underlings — is it quite certain that this 
would better their condition? . . . What 
next? Free them and make them politically 
and socially our equals?" This question he 
answered in the negative, and continued: 
*'It does seem to me that systems of gradual 
emancipation might be adopted, but for 
their tardiness I will not undertake to judge 
our brethren of the South." 

In these extracts from his speeches we 
find a central thread that runs through the 
history of his whole administration. We see 
187 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

it again when, pressed by extremists, Mr. 
Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace 
Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount 
object in this struggle is to save the Union, 
and it is not either to save or to destroy 
slavery. If I could save the Union without 
freeing any slave I would do it; and if I 
could save it by freeing all the slaves I 
would do it; and if I could save it by free- 
ing some and leaving others alone, I would 
also do that." 

Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint 
resolution declared that the sole purpose of 
the war was the preservation of the Union. 
In no other way, and for no other purpose, 
could the North at that time have been in- 
duced to wage war against the South. 

Abraham Lincoln, the President of the 
United States, and Jefferson Davis, the 
President of the Confederate States, were 
both Kentuckians by birth, both Americans. 
In the purity of their lives, public and pri- 
vate, in patriotic devotion to the preserva- 
tion of American institutions as understood 
by each of them, they were alike; but they 
represented different phases of American 
thought, and each was the creature more or 
188 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

less of his environment. Both were men of 
commanding ability, but the destiny of each 
was shaped by agencies that now seem to 
have been directed by the hand of Fate. 
Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, 
was carried to Illinois when a child, reared 
in the North-west among those to whom, 
with the Mississippi River as their only 
outlet to the markets of the world, disunion, 
with its loss of their highway to the sea, 
was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, 
with the Union of the States the passion of 
his life, and finally, by forces he had not 
himself put in motion, he was placed at the 
head of the Federal Government at a time 
when sectionalism had decided that the 
question of the permanence of the Union 
was to be tried out, once and forever. 

Mr. Davis went from Kentucky further 
South. He was a Democrat, and environ- 
ment also moulded his opinions. During 
the long sectional controversy between the 
North and the South, "State-rights" be- 
came the passion of his life, and when the 
clash between the sections came, he found 
himself, without his seeking, at the head of 
the Confederacy. He had been prominent 
189 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

among the Southerners at Washington, who 
had hoped that the South, by threats of 
secession, might obtain its rights in the 
Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days 
by New England. In the movement (1860- 
61) that resulted in secession, the people 
at home had been ahead of their congress- 
men. William L. Yancey, then in Alabama, 
not Jefferson Davis at Washington, was 
the actual leader of the secessionists. Mr. 
Davis feared a long and bloody war and, un- 
like Yancey, he had doubts as to its result.^ 

Mr. Lincoln, standing for the Union, suc- 
ceeded in the war, but just as he was on the 

' Mrs. Chestnut, wife of the Confederate general, James Chest- 
nut, writes in her "Diary from Dixie," under date of 1861, at 
Montgomery, Alabama, then the Confederate capital: "In Mrs. 
Davis's drawing-room last night, the President took a seat by 
me on the sofa where I sat. He talked for nearly an hour. He 
laughed at our faith in our own powers. We are like the British. 
We think every Southerner equal to three Yankees at least. We 
will have to be equivalent to a dozen now. After his experience 
of the fighting qualities of Southerners in Mexico, he believes that 
we will do all that can be done by pluck and muscle, endurance 
and dogged courage, dash, and red-hot patriotism. And yet his 
tone was not sanguine. There was a sad refrain running through 
It all. For one thing, either way, he thinks it will be a long war. 
That floored me at once. It has been too long for me already. 
Then he said, before the end came we would have many bitter 
experiences. He said only fools doubted the courage of the 
Yankees, or their willingness to fight when they saw fit. And 
now that we have stung their pride, we have roused them till they 
will fight like devils." 

190 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

threshold of his great work of Reconstruc- 
tion he fell, the victim of a crazy assassin. 
Martyrdom to his cause has naturally added 
some cubits to the just measure of his won- 
derful reputation. 

Jefferson Davis and his cause failed ; and 
the triumphant forces that swept the Con- 
federacy out of existence have long (and 
quite naturally) sought to bury the cause 
of the South and its chosen leader in igno- 
miny. But the days of hate and passion 
are past; reason is reasserting her sway; 
and history will do justice to both the Con- 
federacy and its great leader, whose ability, 
patriotism, and courage were conspicuous 
to the end. 

Mr. Davis was also a martyr — his long 
imprisonment, the manacles he wore, the 
sentinel gazing on him in the bright light 
that day and night disturbed his rest; the 
heroism with which he endured all this, and 
the quiet dignity of his after life — these 
have doubly endeared his memory to those 
for whose cause he suffered. 

Mr. Lincoln had remarkable political tact 
— he seemed to know how long to wait and 
when to act, and, if we may credit Mr. 
191 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

Welles/ his inflexibly honest Secretary of 
the Navy, he was, with the members of his 
cabinet, wonderfully patient and even long- 
suffering. And although he was the sub- 
ject of much abuse, especially at the hands 
of Southerners who then totally misunder- 
stood him, he was animated always by the 
philosophy of his own famous words, "With 
malice towards none, with charity for all." 
Never for one moment did he forget, amidst 
even the bitterest of his trials, that the Con- 
federates, then in arms against him, were, 
as he regarded them, his misguided fellow- 
citizens; and the supreme purpose of his 
life was to bring them back into the Union, 
not as conquered foes, but as happy and 
contented citizens of the great republic. 

The resources of the Confederacy and the 
United States were very unequal. The Con- 
federacy had no army, no navy, no factories, 
save here and there a flour mill or cotton 
factory, and practically no machine shops 
that could furnish engines for its railroads. 
It had one cannon foundry. The Tredegar 
Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a 
fully equipped cannon foundry. The Con- 

* " Diary of Gideon Welles," 3 vols., passim. 
192 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

federacy's arms and munitions of war were 
not sufficient to supply the troops that vol- 
unteered during the first six months of mih- 
tary operations. Its further suppHes, ex- 
cept such as the Tredegar works furnished, 
depended on importations through the 
blockade soon to be established and such as 
might be captured. 

The North had the army and navy, fac- 
tories of every description, food in abun- 
dance, and free access to the ports of the 
world. 

The population of the North was 22,- 

339,978. 

The population of the South was 9,103,- 
332, of which 3,653,870 were colored. The 
total white male population of the Con- 
federacy, of all ages, was 2,799,818. 

The reports of the Adjutant-General of 
the United States, November 9, 1880, show 
2,859,132 men mustered into the service of 
the United States in 1861-65. General Mar- 
cus J. Wright, of the United States War 
Records Office, in his latest estimate of 
Confederate enlistments, places the out- 
side number at 700,000. The estimate of 
Colonel Henderson, of the staff of the British 
193 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is 
900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of 
Boston, estimates the number of Confeder- 
ates at about 1,000,000, and insists that in 
the Adjutant-General's reports of the Union 
enlistments there are errors that would 
bring down the number of Union soldiers 
to about 2,000,000. Colonel Livermore' s 
estimates are earnestly combated by Con- 
federate writers. 

General Charles Francis Adams has, in a 
recently published volume,* cited figures 
given mostly by different Confederate au- 
thorities, which aggregate 1,052,000 Con- 
federate enlistments. What authority these 
Confederate writers have relied on is not 
clear. The enlistments were for the most 
part directly in the Confederate army and 
not through State officials. The captured 
Confederate records should furnish the high- 
est evidence. But it is earnestly insisted 
that these records are incomplete, and there 
is no purpose here to discuss a disputed 
point. 

The call to arms was answered enthusi- 

' "Studies, Military and Diplomatic," p. 282 et seq. These 
studies make a volume of rare historic value. 

194 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

astically in both sections, but the South 
was more united in its convictions, and 
practically all her young manhood fell into 
line, the rich and the poor, the cultured 
and uncultured serving in the ranks side by 
side. 

The devotion of the noble women of the 
North, and of its humanitarian associations, 
to the welfare of the Federal soldiers was re- 
markable, but there was nothing in the sit- 
uation in that section that could evoke such 
a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self- 
sacrifice as was exhibited by the devoted 
women of the South, who made willingly 
every possible sacrifice to the cause of the 
Confederacy. 

Both sides fought bravely. Excluding 
from the Union armies negroes, foreigners, 
and the descendants of recent immigrants, 
the Confederates and the Union soldiers were 
mainly of British stock. The Confeder- 
ates had some notable advantages. Except- 
ing a few Union regiments from the West, 
the Southerners were better shots and better 
horsemen, especially in the beginning of the 
war, than the Northerners; and the South- 
erners were fighting not only for the Consti- 
195 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

tution of their fathers and the defence of 
their homes, but for the supremacy of their 
race. They had also another miUtary ad- 
vantage, that would probably have been de- 
cisive but for the United States navy: they 
had interior lines of communication which 
would have enabled them to readily concen- 
trate their forces. But the United States 
navy, hovering around their coast-line, not 
only neutralized but turned this advantage 
into a weakness, thus compelling the Con- 
federates to scatter their armies. Every 
port had to be guarded. 

In the West the Federals were almost 
uniformly successful in the greater battles, 
the Confederates winning in these but two 
decisive victories, Chickamauga and Sabine 
Cross Roads, in Louisiana. Estimating, ac- 
cording to the method of military experts, 
the percentage of losses of the victor only, 
Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle of the 
world, from and including Waterloo down to 
the present time. Gettysburg and Sharps- 
burg also rank as high in losses as any 
battle fought elsewhere in this long period, 
which takes in the Franco-German and the 
Russo-Japanese wars. At Sharpsburg or 
196 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Antietam the losses exceeded those in any 
other one day's battle.^ 

The Confederates were successful, except- 
ing Antietam or Sharpsburg and Gettysburg, 
and perhaps Seven Pines or Fair Oaks, in all 
the great battles in the East, down to the 
time when the shattered remnant of Lee's 
army was overwhelmed at Petersburg and 
surrendered at Appomattox. The elan the 
Southerners acquired in the many victories 
they won fighting for their homes is not 
to be overlooked. But the failure of the 
North with its overwhelming numbers and 
resources, to overcome the resistance of the \J 
half-famished Confederates until nearly four 
years had elapsed, can only be fully ac- 
counted for, in fairness to the undoubted 
courage of the Union armies, by the fact, on 
which foreign military critics are agreed, 
that the North had no such generals as Lee 
and Stonewall Jackson. Only by the supe- 
rior generalship of their leaders could the 

1 According to that standard work, E. P. Alexander's "Me- 
moirs," pp. 244, 245, and 274, the Confederates, who stood their 
ground at Sharpsburg on the day of battle and the day after, lost in 
killed and wounded thirty-two per cent. The French army at 
Waterloo entirely dissolved, with a loss in killed and wounded 
of only thirty-one per cent. (See figures in Henderson's "Stone- 
wall Jackson." ) 

197 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

Confederates have won as many battles as 
they did against vastly superior numbers. 

But against the United States navy the 
brilliant generalship of the Confederates and 
their marvellous courage were powerless. 

Accepted histories of the war have been 
written largely by the army and its friends, 
and, strangely enough, the general historians 
have been so attracted by the gallantry dis- 
played in great land battles, and the imme- 
diate results, that they have utterly failed 
to appreciate the services of the United 
States navy. 

The Southerners accomplished remark- 
able results with torpedoes with the Merri- 
mac or Virginia and their little fleet of com- 
merce destroyers; but the United States 
navy, by its effective blockade, starved the 
Confederacy to death. The Southern gov- 
ernment could not market its cotton, nor 
could it import or manufacture enough mili- 
tary supplies. Among its extremest needs 
were rails and rolling stock to refit its lines 
of communication. For want of transpor- 
tation it was unable to concentrate its 
armies, and for the same reason its troops 
were not half fed. 

198 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

In addition to its services on the block- 
ade, which, in Lord Wolseley's opinion, 
decided the war, the navy, with General 
Grant's help, cut the Confederacy in twain 
by way of the Mississippi. It penetrated 
every Southern river, severing Confederate 
communications and destroying depots of 
supplies. It assisted in the capture, early in 
the war, of Forts Henry and Donelson, and 
it conducted Union troops along the Ten- 
nessee River into east Tennessee and north 
Alabama. It furnished objective points 
and supplies at Savannah, Charleston, and 
Wilmington, to Sherman on his march from 
Atlanta ; and finally Grant, the great Union 
general, who had failed to reach Richmond 
by way of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and 
Cold Harbor, achieved success only when the 
navy was at his back, holding his base, while 
he laid a nine months' siege to Petersburg. 

That distinguished author, Charles Fran- 
cis Adams, himself a Union general in the 
Army of the Potomac, says that the United 
States navy was the deciding factor in the 
Civil War. He even says that every single 
successful operation of the Union forces 
"hinged and depended on naval supremacy." 
199 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

The following is from the preface to 
"The Crisis of the Confederacy," in which, 
published in 1905, a foreign expert. Captain 
Cecil Battine, of the King's Hussars, con- 
denses all that needs further to be said here 
about the purely military side of the Civil 
War: 

The history of the American Civil War still re- 
mains the most important theme for the student 
and the statesman because it was waged between 
adversaries of the highest intelhgence and courage, 
who fought by land and sea over an enormous area 
with every device within the reach of human inge- 
nuity, and who had to create every organization 
needed for the purpose after the struggle had begun. 
The admiration which the valor of the Confederate 
soldiers, fighting against superior numbers and re- 
sources, excited in Europe; the dazzling genius of 
some of the Confederate generals, and in some meas- 
ure jealousy at the power of the United States, have 
ranged the sympathies of the world during the war 
and ever since to a large degree on the side of the 
vanquished. Justice has hardly been done to the 
armies which arose time and again from sanguinary 
repulses, and from disasters more demoralizing than 
any repulse in the field, because they were caused 
by political and military incapacity in high places, to 
redeem which the soldiers freely shed their blood as 
it seemed in vain. If the heroic endurance of the 
Southern people and the fiery valor of the Southern 
200 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

armies thrill us to-day with wonder and admiration, 
the stubborn tenacity and courage which succeeded 
in preserving intact the heritage of the American 
nation, and which triumphed over foes so formid- 
able, are not less worthy of praise and imitation. 
The Americans still hold the world's record for hard 
fighting. 

The great majority of the Union soldiers 
enhsted for the preservation of the Union 
and not for the abohtion of slavery. But 
among these soldiers there was an abolition 
element, and very soon the tramp of fed- 
eral regiments was keeping time to 

"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the ground. 
As we go marching on." 

Early in the war Generals Fremont and 
Butler issued orders declaring free the slaves 
within the Union lines; these orders Presi- 
dent Lincoln rescinded. But Abolition sen- 
timent was growing in the army and at the 
North, and the pressure upon the President 
to strike at slavery was increasing. The 
Union forces were suffering repeated defeats; 
slaves at home were growing food crops and 
caring for the families of Confederates who 
were fighting at the front, and in September, 

20I 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

1862, President Lincoln issued his prelim- 
inary proclamation of emancipation, basing 
it on the ground of military necessity. It 
was to become effective January i, 1863. 

And here was the same Lincoln who had 
declared in 1858 his opinion that whites and 
blacks could not live together as equals, 
socially and politically; and it was the very 
same Lincoln who had repeatedly said he 
cherished no ill-will against his Southern 
brethren. If the slaves were to be freed, they 
and the whites should not be left together. 
He therefore sought diligently to find some 
home for the freedmen in a foreign country. 
But unfortunately, as already seen, the 
American negro, a bone of contention at 
home, was now a pariah to other peoples. 
Most nations welcome immigrants, but no 
country was willing to shelter the American 
freedman, save only Liberia, long before a 
proven failure, and Hayti, where, under the 
blacks, anarchy had already been chronic 
for half a century. Hume tells us, in "The 
Abolitionists," that for a time Mr. Lincoln 
even considered setting Texas apart as a 
home for the negro. 

Later the surrender of the Confederate 
202 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

armies, together with the adoption of the 
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitu- 
tion, consummated emancipation, foreseeing 
which President Lincoln formulated his plan 
of Reconstruction. Suffrage in the recon- 
structed States under his plan was to be 
limited to those who were qualified to vote 
at the date of secession, which meant the 
whites. The sole exception he ever made 
to this rule was a suggestion to Governor 
Hahn, of Louisiana, that it might be well 
for the whites (of Louisiana) to give the 
ballot to a few of the most intelligent of 
the negroes and to such as had served in 
the army. 

The part the soldiers played. Federal and 
Confederate, in restoring the Union, is a 
short story. The clash between them set- 
tled without reserve the only question that 
was really in issue — secession; slavery, that 
had been the origin of sectional dissensions, 
was eliminated because it obstructed the 
success of the Union armies. By their gal- 
lantry in battle and conduct toward each 
other the men in blue and the men in gray 
restored between the North and the South 
the mutual respect that had been lost in 
203 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the bitterness of sectional strife, and with- 
out which there could be no fraternal Union. 

Mr. Gladstone, when the war was on, 
said that the North was endeavoring to 
"propagate free institutions at the point of 
the sword." The North was not seeking to 
propagate in the South any new institution 
whatever. Mr. Gladstone's paradox loses 
its point because both sections were fighting 
for the preservation of the same system of 
government. 

The time has now happily come when, to 
use the language of Senator Hoar, as Amer- 
icans, we can. North and South, discuss the 
causes that brought about our terrible war 
"in a friendly and quiet spirit, without re- 
crimination and without heat, each under- 
standing the other, each striving to help the 
other, as men who are bearing a common 
burden and looking forward with a common 
hope." 

The country, it is believed, has already 
reached the conclusions that the South was 
absolutely honest in maintaining the right 
of secession and absolutely unswerving in 
its devotion to its ideas of the Constitution, 
and that the North was equally honest and 
204 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

patriotic in its fidelity to the Union. We 
need to advance one step further. Some- 
body was to blame for starting a quarrel 
between brethren who were dwelling to- 
gether in amity. If Americans can agree 
in fixing that blame, the knowledge thus 
acquired should help them to avoid such 
troubles hereafter. 

It seems to be a fair conclusion that the 
initial cause of all our troubles was the for7na' 
tion by Garrison of those Abolition societies 
which the Boston people in their resolutions 
of August I, 1835, "disapproved of" and 
described as "associations instituted in the 
non-slave-holding States, with the intent to 
act, within the slave-holding States, on the 
subject of slavery in those States, without 
their consent." And further, that it was the 
creation of these societies, the methods they 
resorted to, and their explicit defiance of the 
Constitution that roused the fears and pas- 
sions of the South and caused that section 
to take up the quarrel that, afterward be- 
came sectional; and that, after much hot 
dispute and many regrettable incidents, 
North and South, resulted in secession and 
war. 

205 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

In every dispute about slavery prior to 
1 83 1, the Constitution was always regarded 
by every disputant as supreme. The quar- 
rel that was fatal to the peace of the Union be- 
gan when the New Abolitionists put in the new 
claim, that slavery in the South was the con- 
cern of the North, as well as of the South, and 
that there was a higher law than the Constitu- 
tion. If the conscience of the individual, in- 
stead of human law, is to prescribe rules of 
conduct, society is at the mercy of anarchists. 
Czolgosz was conscientious when he murdered 
McKinley. 

Had all Americans continued to agree, 
after 183 1, as they did before that time, that 
the Constitution of the United States was 
the supreme law of the land, there would 
have been no fatal sectional quarrel, no se- 
cession, and no war between the North and 
South. 

The immediate surrender everywhere of 
the Confederates in obedience to the orders 
of their generals was an imposing spectacle. 
There was no guerilla warfare. The Con- 
federates accepted their defeat in good faith 
and have ever since been absolutely loyal 
206 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

to the United States Government, but they 
have never changed their minds as to the 
justice of the cause they fought for. They 
fought for Hberty regulated by law, and 
against the idea that there can be, under our 
system, any higher law than the Constitu- 
tion of our country. That the Constitution 
should always be the supreme law of the 
land, they still believe, and the philosophic 
student of past and current history should 
be gratified to see the tenacity with which 
Southern people still cling to that idea. It 
suggests that not only will the Southerners 
be always ready to stand for our country 
against a foreign foe, but that whenever our 
institutions shall be assailed, as they will 
often be hereafter by visionaries who are 
impatient of restraints, the cause of liberty, 
regulated by law, will find staunch defenders 
in the Southern section of our country. 



207 



CHAPTER X 

RECONSTRUCTION, LINCOLN-JOHNSON 
PLAN AND CONGRESSIONAL. 

PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S theory was 
that acts of secession were void, and 
that when the seceded States came back into 
the Union those who were entitled to vote, 
by the laws existing at the date of the at- 
tempted secession, and had been pardoned, 
should have, and should control, the right 
of suffrage. Mr. Lincoln had acted on this 
theory in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, 
and he further advised Congress, in his 
message of December, 1863, that this was 
his plan. Congress, after a long debate, re- 
sponded in July, 1864, by an act claiming 
for itself power over Reconstruction. The 
President answered by a pocket veto, and 
after that veto Mr. Lincoln was, in Novem- 
ber, 1864, re-elected on a platform extolling 
his "practical wisdom,'' etc. Congress, 
during the session that began in December, 
1864, did not attempt to reassert its au- 
208 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

thority but adjourned, March 4, 1865, in 
sight of the collapse of the Confederacy, 
leaving the President an open field for his 
declared policy. 

But unhappily, on the 14th of April, 1865, 
Mr. Lincoln was assassinated, and his death 
just at this time was the most appalling ca- 
lamity that ever befell the American people. 
The blow fell chiefly upon the South, and 
it was the South the assassin had thought 
to benefit. 

Had the great statesman lived he might, 
and it is fully believed he would, like 
Washington, have achieved a double success. 
Washington, successful in war, was success- 
ful in guiding his country through the first 
eight stormy years of its existence under a 
new constitution. Lincoln had guided the 
country through four years of war, and the 
Union was now safe. With Lee's surrender 
the war was practically at an end. 

Gideon Welles says that on the loth of 
April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln, "while I was with 
him at the White House, was informed that 
his fellow-citizens would call to congratu- 
late him on the fall of Richmond and sur- 
render of Lee; but he requested their visit 
209 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

should be delayed that he might have time 
to put his thoughts on paper, for he desired 
that his utterances on such an occasion 
should be dehberate and not Hable to misap- 
prehension, misinterpretation, or miscon- 
struction. He therefore addressed the people 
on the following evening, Tuesday the nth, 
in a carefully prepared speech intended to 
promote harmony and union. 

"In this remarkable speech, delivered three 
days before his assassination, he stated he 
had prepared a plan for the reinauguration 
of the sectional authority and reconstruction 
in 1863, which would be acceptable to the ex- 
ecutive government, and that every member 
of the cabinet fully approved the plan," etc.^ 

In view of his death three days later, this, 
his last and dehberate public utterance, may 
be regarded as Abraham Lincoln's will, de- 
vising as a legacy to his countrymen his plan 
of reconstruction. That plan in the hands 
of his successor was defeated by a partisan 
and radical Congress. That it was a wise 
plan the world now knows. 

Senator John Sherman, of Ohio, was one 

' Gideon Welles in an essay, " Lincoln and Johnson," The 
Galaxy, April, 1872. 

210 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

of the most influential of those who suc- 
ceeded in defeating it, and yet he lived to 
say, in his book published in 1895,^ Andrew 
Johnson "adopted substantially the plan 
proposed and acted on by Mr. Lincoln. 
After this long lapse of time I am con- 
vinced that Mr. Johnson's scheme of reor- 
ganization was wise and judicious. It was 
unfortunate that it had not the sanction of 
Congress and that events soon brought the 
President and Congress into hostility." 

And the present senator, Shelby Cul- 
lom, of Illinois, who as a member of the 
House of Representatives voted to over- 
throw the Lincoln-Johnson plan of Recon- 
struction, has furnished us further testi- 
mony. He says in his book, published in 
1911:^ 

"To express it in a word, the motive of 
the opposition to the Johnson plan of Re- 
construction was a firm conviction that its 
success would wreck the Republican party 
and, by restoring the Democracy to power, 
bring back Southern supremacy and North- 
ern vassalage." 

' "John Sherman's Recollections," vol. I, p. 361. 
' " Fifty Years of Public Service," Cullom, p. 146. 

211 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

The Republican party, then dominant in 
Congress, felt when confronting Reconstruc- 
tion that it was facing a crisis in its exist- 
ence. The Democratic party, unitedly op- 
posed to negro suffrage, was still in Northern 
States a power to be reckoned with. Allied 
with the Southern whites, that old party 
might again control the government unless, 
by giving the negro the ballot, the Repub- 
licans could gain, as Senator Sumner said, 
the "allies it needed." But the masses at 
the North were opposed to negro suffrage, 
and only two or three State constitutions 
sanctioned it. Indeed, it may be safely said 
that when Congress convened in December, 
1865, a majority of the people of the North 
were ready to follow Johnson and approve 
the Lincoln plan of Reconstruction. But 
the extremists in both branches of the Con- 
gress had already determined to defeat the 
plan and to give the ballot to the ex-slave. 
To prepare the mind of the Northern peo- 
ple for their programme, they had resolved 
to rekindle the passions of the war, which 
were now smouldering, and utilize all the 
machinery, military and civilian, that Con- 
gress could make effective. 
212 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Andrew Johnson/ who as vice-president 
now succeeded to the presidency, though a 
man of ability, had Httle personal influence 
and none of Lincoln's tact. Johnson re- 
tained Lincoln's cabinet, and McCullough, 
who was Secretary of the Treasury under 
both presidents, says in his " Men and Meas- 
ures of Half a Century," p. 378: 

"The very same instrument for restoring 
the national authority over North Carolina 
and placing her where she stood before her 
secession, which had been approved by Mr. 
Lincoln, was, by Mr. Stanton, presented at 
the first cabinet which was held at the execu- 
tive mansion after Mr. Lincoln's death, and, 
having been carefully considered at two or 
three meetings, was adopted as the Recon- 
struction policy of the administration." 

Johnson carried out this plan. All the 
eleven seceding States repealed their ordi- 
nances of secession. Their voters, from 
which class many leaders had been excluded 
by the presidential proclamation, all took 

1 The final estimate of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy 
under both Lincoln and Johnson, is this: "He (Johnson) has been 
faithful to the Constitution, although his administrative capa- 
bilities and management may not equal some of his predecessors. 
Of measures he was a good judge but not always of men."— "Diary 
of Gideon Welles," vol. Ill, p. 556. 
213 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

the oath of allegiance, and reconstructed 
their State governments. From most of 
the reconstructed States, senators and rep- 
resentatives were in Washington asking to 
be seated when Congress convened, De- 
cember 4, 1865. 

The presidential plan of Reconstruction 
had been promptly accepted by the people 
of the prostrate States. Almost without 
exception they had, when permitted, taken 
the oath and returned to their allegiance. 

The wretchedness of these people in the 
spring of 1865 was indescribable. The labor 
system on which they depended for most of 
their money-producing crops was destroyed. 
Including the disabled, twenty per cent of 
the whites, who would now have been bread- 
winners, were gone. The credit system had 
been universal, and credit was gone. Banks 
were bankrupt. Confederate currency and 
bonds were worthless. Provisions were 
scarce and money even scarcer. Many land- 
holders had not even plough stock with 
which to make a crop. 

There was some cotton, however, that 
had escaped the ravages of war, and a large 
part of this also escaped the rapacious 
214 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

United States agents, who were seizing it 
as Confederate property. This cotton was 
a godsend. There was another supply of 
money that came from an unexpected source. 
The old anti-slavery controversy had made 
it seem perfectly clear to many moneyed 
men, North, that free labor was always su- 
perior to slave labor; and now, when cotton 
was bringing a good price, enterprising men 
carried their money, altogether some hun- 
dreds of thousands of dollars, into the sev- 
eral cotton States, to buy plantations and 
make cotton with free negro labor. Free 
negro labor was not a success. Those who 
had reckoned on it lost their money; but this 
money went into circulation and was helpful. 
Above all else loomed the negro problem. 
Five millions of whites and three and a half 
millions of blacks were to live together. 
Thomas Jefferson had said, "Nothing is 
more certainly w ritten in the Book of Fate 
than that these people are to be free; nor 
is it less certain that the two races, equally free, 
cannot live in the same government. Nature, 
habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines 
between them.'' ^ And it may truly be said 

1 "Jefferson's Works," vol. I, p. 48. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

of Jefferson that he was, as quite recently 
he was declared to be by Dr. Schurman, 
President of Cornell University, the "apos- 
tle of reason, and reason alone." 

What system of laws could Southern con- 
ventions and legislatures frame, that would 
enable them to accomplish what Jefferson 
had declared was impossible.? This was the 
question before these bodies when called to- 
gether in 1865-66 by Johnson to rehabili- 
tate their States. Two dangers confronted 
them. One was, armed bands of negroes, 
headed by returning negro soldiers. Mr. 
Lincoln had feared this. Early in April of 
that very year, 1865, he said to General 
Butler: " I can hardly believe that the South 
and North can live in peace unless we can 
get rid of the negroes, whom we have armed 
and disciplined, and who have fought with us, 
to the amount, I believe, of one hundred and 
fifty thousand." Mississippi, and perhaps 
one other State, to guard against the danger 
from this source, enacted that negroes were 
only to bear arms when licensed. This law 
was to be fiercely attacked. 

The other chief danger was that idleness 
among the negroes would lead to crime. 
216 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

It soon became apparent that the negro 
idea was that freedom meant freedom from 
work. They would not work steadily, even 
for their Northern friends, who were offer- 
ing ready money for labor in their cotton 
fields, and multitudes were loitering in 
towns and around Freedmen's Bureau of- 
fices. Nothing seemed better than the old- 
time remedies, apprenticeship and vagrancy 
laws, then found in every body of British or 
American statutes. These laws Southern 
legislatures copied, with what appeared to 
be necessary modifications, and these laws 
were soon assailed as evidence of an intent 
to reduce the negro again to slavery. Mr. 
James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," 
selected the Alabama statutes for his at- 
tack. In the writer's book, "Why the Solid 
South," pp. 31-36, the Alabama statutes 
cited by Mr. Blaine are shown to be very 
similar to and largely copied from the stat- 
utes of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode 
Island. 

Had Mr. Lincoln been living he would 
have sympathized with these Southern law- 
makers in their difficult task. But to the 
radicals in Congress nothing could have been 
217 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

satisfactory that did not give Mr. Sumner's 
party the "aUies it needed." 

The first important step of the Congress 
that convened December 4, 1865, was to 
refuse admission to the congressmen from 
the States reconstructed under the Lincoln- 
Johnson plan, and pass a joint resolution for 
the appointment of a Committee of Fifteen 
to inquire into conditions in those States. 

The temper of that Congress may be 
gauged by the following extract from the 
speech of Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, on the 
passage of the joint resolution: 

"They framed iniquity and universal 
murder into law. . . . Their pirates burned 
your unarmed commerce on the sea. They 
carved the bones of your dead heroes into 
ornaments, and drank from goblets made 
out of their skulls. They poisoned your 
fountains; put mines under your soldiers' 
prisons; organized bands, whose leaders 
were concealed in your homes; and com- 
missions ordered the torch and yellow fever 
to be carried to your cities and to your 
women and children. They planned one 
universal bonfire of the North from Lake 
Ontario to the Missouri," etc. 
218 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Congress, while refusing admission to 
senators elected by the_ legislatures of the 
reconstructed States, was permitting these 
very bodies to pass on amendments to 
the Federal Constitution; and such votes 
were counted. Congress now proposed the 
Fourteenth Amendment, Section III of 
which provided that no person should hold 
office under the United States who, having 
taken an oath, as a Federal or State officer, 
to support the Constitution, had subse- 
quently engaged in the war against the 
Union. The Southerners would not vote 
for a provision that would disfranchise their 
leaders; they refused to ratify the Four- 
teenth Amendment, and this helped further 
to inflame the radicals of the North. 

After the Committee of Fifteen had been 
appointed, Congress proceeded to put the 
reconstructed States under military control. 
In the debate on the measure, February i8, 
1867, James A. Garfield, who was, at a later 
date, to become generous and conservative, 
said exultingly: "This bill sets out by lay- 
ing its hands on the rebel governments and 
taking the very breath of life out of them; 
in the next place, it puts the bayonet at the 
219 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

breast of every rebel in the South; in the 
next place, it leaves in the hands of Con- 
gress utterly and absolutely the work of 
Reconstruction." 

And Congress did its work. Lincoln was 
in his grave, and Johnson, even with his 
vetoes, was powerless. By the acts of March 
2 and March 23, 1867, the reconstructed 
governments were swept away. Universal 
suffrage was given to the negro and most of 
the prominent whites were disfranchised. 

The first suffrage bill was for the Dis- 
trict of Columbia, during the debate on 
which Senator Sumner said: "Now, to my 
mind, nothing is clearer than the absolute 
necessity of suffrage for all colored persons 
in the disorganized States. It will not be 
enough, if you give it to those who can read 
and write ; you will not in this way acquire 
the voting force you need there for the 
protection of Unionists, whether white or 
black. You will not acquire the new allies 
who are essential to the national cause." 

In the forty-first Congress, beginning 
March 4, 1871, the twelve reconstructed 
States, including West Virginia, were repre- 
sented by twenty- two Republicans and two 
220 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Democrats in the Senate, and forty-eight 
RepubHcans and twelve Democrats in the 
House of Representatives. 

Mr. Sumner's "new aUies" were ready to 
answer to the roll-call. 

When Congress had convened in Decem- 
ber, 1865, its radical leaders were already 
bent on universal suffrage for the negro, but 
the Northern mind was not yet prepared for 
so radical a measure. The "Committee of 
Fifteen" was the first step in the programme, 
which was to hold the Southern States out 
of the Union and make an appeal to the 
passions and prejudices of Northern voters 
in the congressional elections of November, 
1866. Valuable material for the coming 
campaign was already being furnished by 
the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. These 
"adventurers, broken down preachers, and 
pohticians," as Senator Fessenden, of Maine, 
called them, were, and had been for some 
time, reporting "outrages," swearing ne- 
groes into midnight leagues, and selecting 
the offices they hoped to fill. 

But the chief source of the material relied 
upon in the congressional campaign of 1866 
221 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

to exasperate the North, and prod voters to 
the point of sanctioning negro suffrage in 
the South, was the official information from 
the Committee of Fifteen. Its subcommit- 
tee of three, to take testimony as to Virginia, 
North and South Carolina, Georgia, Ala- 
bama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were all 
Republica7is. The doings of this subcom- 
mittee in Alabama illustrate their methods. 
Only five persons, who claimed to be citi- 
zens, were examined. These were all Re- 
publican politicians. The testimony of each 
was bitterly partisan. "Under the govern- 
ment of the State as it then existed, no one 
of these witnesses could hope for oflicial 
preferment. When this Reconstruction plan 
had been completed the first of these five 
witnesses became governor of his State; the 
second became a senator in Congress; the 
third secured a life position in one of the 
departments in Washington; the fourth be- 
came a circuit judge in Alabama, and the 
fifth a judge of the Supreme Court of the 
District of Columbia — all as Republicans. 
There was no Democrat in the subcommit- 
tee which examined these gentlemen, to cross- 
examine them; and not a citizen of Alabama 

222 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

was called before that subcommittee to con- 
fute or explain their evidence." ^ 

With the material gathered by these 
means and from these sources, the honest 
voters of the North were deluded into the 
election of a Congress that went to Wash- 
ington, in December, 1866, armed with au- 
thority to pass the Reconstruction laws of 
March, 1867. 

Southern counsels were now much divided. 
Many good men, like Governor Brown, of 
Georgia ; General Longstreet and ex-Senator 
Albert Gallatin Brown, of Mississippi, ad- 
vised acquiescence and assistance, "not be- 
cause we approve the policy of Reconstruc- 
tion, but because it is the best we can do." 
These advisers hoped that good men, well 
known to the negroes, might control them 
for the country's good; and zealous efforts 
were made along this line in every State, but 
they were futile. The blacks had already, 
before they got the suffrage, accepted the 
leadership of those claiming to be the "men 
who had freed them." These leaders were 
not only bureau agents but army camp- 
followers ; and there was still another brood, 

1 "Why the Solid South," p. 20. 
223 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

who espied from afar a political Eden in the 
prostrate States and forthwith journeyed 
to it. All these Northern adventurers were 
called "carpet-baggers" — they carried their 
worldly goods in their hand-bags. The 
Southerners who entered into a joint-stock 
business with them became "scalawags." 
These people mustered the negroes into 
leagues, and everywhere whispered it into 
their ears that the aim of the Southern 
whites was to reenslave them. 

Politics in the South in the days before 
the war had always been more or less in- 
tense, partly because there were so many 
who had leisure, and partly because the gen- 
eral rule was joint political discussions. The 
seams that had divided Whigs and Demo- 
crats, Secessionists and Union men, had not 
been entirely closed up, even by the melting 
fires of the Civil War. Old feuds for a time 
played their part in Southern politics, even 
after March, 1867. These old feuds made 
it difficult for Southern whites to get to- 
gether as a race; and, in fact, conservative 
men dreaded the idea. It tended toward 
an actual race war which, for many years, 
had been a nightmare; but in every recon- 
224 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

structed State the negro and his aUies finally 
forced the race issue. 

The new rulers not only increased taxes 
and misappropriated the revenues of coun- 
ties, cities, and States; they bartered away 
the credit of State after State. Some of 
the States, after they were redeemed, scaled 
their debts by compromising with creditors; 
others have struggled along with their in- 
creased burdens. 

There were hundreds of negro policemen, 
constables, justices of the peace, and legis- 
lators who could not write their names. 
Justice was in many localities a farce. 
Ex-slaves became judges, representatives in 
Congress, and United States senators. The 
eleven Confederate States had been divided 
into military districts. Many of the officers 
and men who were scattered over the coun- 
try to uphold negro rule sympathized with 
the whites and evidenced their sympathy in 
various ways. Others, either because they 
were radicals at heart, or to commend them- 
selves to their superiors, who were some of 
them aspiring to political places, were super- 
serviceable; and it was not uncommon for a 
military officer, in a case where a negro was 

225 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

a party, to order a judge to leave the bench 
and himself take the place. In communi- 
ties where negro majorities were overwhelm- 
ing there were usually two factions, and when 
political campaigns were on agents for these 
clans often scoured the fields clear of labor- 
ers to recruit their marching bands. In 
cities these bands made night hideous with 
shouts and the noise of fifes and drums. 
The negro would tolerate no defection from 
his ranks to the whites, and negro women 
were more intolerant than the men. It 
sometimes happened that a bloody clash 
between the races was imminent when white 
men sought to protect a negro who had 
dared to speak in favor of the Democratic 
and Conservative party. In truth, the civ- 
ilization of the South was being changed 
from white to negroid. 

The final triumph of good government in 
all the States was at last accomplished by 
accepting the race issue, as in Alabama in 
1874. The first resolution in the platform of 
the "Democratic and Conservative party" 
in that State then was, "The radical and 
dominant faction of the Republican party 
in this State persistently, and by fraudulent 
226 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

representations, have inflamed the passions 
and prejudices of the negroes, as a race, 
against the white people, and have thereby 
made it necessary for the white people to 
unite and act together in self-defence and 
for the preservation of white civilization." 

The people of North Carolina recovered 
the right of self-government in 1870. Other 
States followed from time to time, the last 
two being Louisiana and South Carolina in 
1877. 

Edwin L. Godkin, who was for long at 
the head of the Nation and the Evening Post, 
of New York, is thought by some competent 
judges to have been the ablest editor this 
country has ever had. After the last of the 
negro governments set up in the South had 
passed away, looking back over the whole 
bad business, Mr. Godkin, in a letter to his 
friend Charles Eliot Norton, written from 
Sweet Springs, West Virginia, September 3, 
1877, said: "I do not see in short how the 
negro is ever to be worked into a system 
of government for which you and I could 
have much respect."^ 

* Ogden's "Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin," vol. 
II, p. 114. 

227 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

Garrison is dead. At the centenary of his 
birth, December 12, 1904, an effort was made 
to arouse enthusiasm. There was only a 
feeble response; but we still have extre- 
mists. Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard, 
in "Race Questions" (1906), speaking of 
race antipathies as "trained hatred," says, 
pp. 48-49: "We can remember that they are 
childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena 
on a level with the dread of snakes or of 
mice, phenomena that we share with the 
cats and with the dogs, not noble phenom- 
ena, but caprices of our complex nature." 



228 



CHAPTER XI 

THE SOUTH UNDER SELF-GOVERNMENT 

F)R now more than thirty years, whites 
and blacks, both free, have lived to- 
gether in the reconstructed States. In some 
of them there have been local clashes, but in 
none of them has there been race war, pre- 
dicted by Jefferson and feared by Lincoln; 
and there probably never will be such a war, 
unless it shall come through the interven- 
tion of such an outside force as produced 
in the South the conflict between the races 
at the polls in 1868-76. 

Every State government set up under the 
plan of Congress had wrought ruin, and the 
ruin was always more complete where the 
negroes were most numerous, as in South 
Carolina and Louisiana. 

The rule of the carpet-bagger and the 
negro was now superseded by governments 
based on Abraham Lincoln's idea, the idea 
he expressed in the debate with Douglas in 
1858, when he said: "While they [the two 
229 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

races] do remain together there must be the 
position of inferior and superior, and I, as 
much as any other man, am in favor of hav- 
ing the superior position assigned to the white 
man." 

Conducted on this basis, the present gov- 
ernments in the reconstructed States have 
endured'now for periods varying from thirt}^- 
six to forty- two years, and in every State, 
without any exception, the prosperity of 
both whites and blacks has been wonderful, 
and this in spite of the still existent abnor- 
mal animosities engendered by congressional 
reconstruction. 

In the present State governments the race 
problem seems to have reached, in its larger 
lines, its only practicable solution. There is 
still, however, much friction between whites 
and blacks. Higher culture among the 
masses, especially of the dominant race, and 
wise leadership in both races, will in time 
minimize this, but it is not to be expected, 
nor is it ever to be desired, that racial an- 
tipathies should entirely cease to exist. The 
result of such cessation would be amalgama- 
tion, a solution that American whites will 
never tolerate. 

230 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Deportation, as a solution of the negro 
problem, is impracticable. Mr. Lincoln, 
much as he desired the separation of the 
races, could not accomplish it, even when 
he had all the war power of the government 
in his hands. He was, as we have seen, un- 
able to find a country that would take the 
3,500,000 of blacks then in the seceded 
States. Now, there are in the South, includ- 
ing Delaware, according to the census of 19 10, 
8,749,390, and, quite naturally, the American 
negro is more unwilling than ever to leave 
America. 

Another solution sometimes suggested in 
the South is the repeal of the Fifteenth 
Amendment, which declares that the negro 
shall not be deprived of the ballot because 
of his race, but agitation for this would ap- 
pear to be worse than useless. 

The negro vote in the reconstructed States 
is, and has for years been, quite small, not 
large enough to be considered a factor in any 
of them. One cause of this is that the whites 
enforce against the blacks rigidly the tests 
required by law, but the chief reason is, 
that the negro, who is qualified, does not 
often apply for registration. He finds work 
231 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

now more profitable than voting. He can 
not, he knows, control, nor can he, if dis- 
posed to do so, sell his ballot as he once did. 
One of the most signal and durable evils of 
Congressional Reconstruction was the utter 
debasement of the suffrage in eleven States 
where the ballot had formerly been notably 
pure. Gideon Welles saw clearly when he 
said in his diary, June 23, 1867 (p. 102, 
vol. Ill): "Under the pretence of elevating 
the negro the radicals are degrading the 
whites and debasing the elective franchise, 
bringing elections into contempt." During 
the rule of the negro and the alien, in every 
black county, where the negro majority was 
as two to one, there were, as a rule, two Re- 
publican candidates for every fat office, and 
an election meant, for the negro, a golden 
harvest. Rival candidates were mercilessly 
fleeced by their black constituencies, and the 
belief South is that as a rule the carpet- 
baggers, in their hegira, returned North as 
poor as when they came. 

In the Reconstruction era the whites 
fought fraud with fraud ; and even after re- 
covering control they, the whites, felt justi- 
fied in continuing to defraud the negro of 
232 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

his vote. To restore the purity of the 
ballot-box was the chief reason for the 
amendments to State constitutions, by 
means of which amendments, having in 
view the limitations of the Federal Consti- 
tution, as many negroes and as few whites 
as was practicable were excluded. 

This accounts in part for the smallness of 
the negro vote South. A more potent reason 
is that the Democratic party, dominated by 
whites, selects its candidates in primaries; 
and the negro, seeing no chance to win, does 
not care to pay a poll tax or otherwise qual- 
ify for registration. 

Southern whites have now for more than 
three decades been governing the blacks in 
their midst. It is the most difficult task 
that has ever been undertaken in all the his- 
tory of popular government, but sad experi- 
ence has demonstrated that legal restriction 
of the negro vote in the South there must be. 

Party spirit tends always to blind the vi- 
sion, and, as we have seen in this review 
of the past, it often stifles conscience; and 
this even where the masses of the people 
are approximately homogeneous. Southern 
statesmen are now dealing not only with 
233 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

party spirit, but with perpetual race fric- 
tion manifesting itself in various forms. 
Failure there must be in minor matters and 
in certain localities; the progress that has 
been made can only be fairly estimated by 
considering general results. Those who sym- 
pathize with the South think they see there 
among the whites a growing spirit of altru- 
ism, begotten of responsibility, and this 
promises much for the amelioration of race 
friction. 

Since obtaining control of their State gov- 
ernments the whites in the Southern States 
have as a rule increased appropriations for 
common schools by at least four hundred 
per cent, and though paying themselves by 
far the greater proportion of these taxes, 
they have continued to divide revenues pro 
rata between the white and colored schools. 

Industrial results have been amazing. 
The following figures, taken from the Annual 
Blue Book, 191 1 edition, of the Manvfac- 
turers' Record, Baltimore, Maryland, in- 
clude West Virginia among the recon- 
structed States. 

The population of these States was, in 
1880, 13,608,703; in 1910, 23,613,533. 
234 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

Manufacturing capital, 1880, ^147,156,- 
624. In 1900 — twenty years — it was 
^1,019,056,200. 

Cotton crop, whole South, 1880, 5,761,- 
252 bales. In 191 1 it was about 15,000,000. 

Of this cotton crop Southern mills took, 
in 1880, 321,337 bales, and in 1910, 2,344,- 
343 bales. 

In 1880 the twelve reconstructed States 
cut, of lumber, board measure, 2,981,274,- 
000 feet; and in 1909 22,445,000,000 feet. 

Their output of pig-iron was, in 1880, 
264,991 long tons; in 19 10, 3,048,000 tons. 
The assessed value of taxable property was, 
in 1880, $2,106,971,271; in 1910, $6,522,- 

195,139- 

The negro, though the white man, with 
his superior energy and capacity, far out- 
strips him, has shared in this material pros- 
perity. His property in these States has 
been estimated as high as $500,000,000. 

During the last decade, 1900-1910, the 
white population of the South increased by 
24.4 per cent, while the negro population in 
the same States increased only 10.4 per cent. 
There has been a very considerable gain of 
whites over blacks since 1880, the result 
largely of a greater natural increase of whites 
23s 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

over blacks, immigrants not counted. All 
this indicates that the negro problem is 
gradually being minimized. 

Taken in the aggregate, the shortcomings 
of the negro are numerous and regrettable, 
but not greater than was to be expected. 
The general advance of an inferior race will 
never equal that of one which is superior by- 
nature and already centuries ahead. The 
laggard and thriftless among the inferior 
people will naturally be more, and it is from 
these classes that prison houses are filled. 

There is a very considerable class of ne- 
groes who are improving mentally and mor- 
ally, but improvidence is a characteristic of 
the race, and very many of them, even 
though they labor more or less steadily, will 
never accumulate. The third class, much 
larger than among the whites, is composed 
of those who are idle, dissipated, and crim- 
inal. Taken altogether, however, what 
Booker Washington says is true: "There 
cannot be found, in the civilized or uncivil- 
ized world, a like number of negroes whose 
economic, educational, and religious life is 
so far advanced as that of the ten millions 
within this country."^ This advancement 

* Pickett, pp. 399-4CX). 
236 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

is one of the results of slavery. When the 
negroes come to recognize this, as some of 
their leaders already do,^ and come to ap- 
preciate the advantages for further improve- 
ment they have had since their emancipa- 
tion, they will cease to repine over the 
bondage of their ancestors. There were 
undoubtedly evils in slavery, but, after all, 
there was some reason in the advice given 
by the good Spanish Bishop Las Casas to 
the King of Spain — that it would be right- 
ful to enslave and thus Christianize and 
civilize the African savage. Herbert Spen- 
cer, "Illustrations of Universal Progress" 
(p. 444), says: "Hateful though it is to us, 
and injurious as it would be now, slavery 
was once beneficial, was one of the necessary 
phases of human progress'' 

Sir Harry Johnston, African explorer and 
student of the negro race, in both the old 
and the new world, and perhaps the most 
eminent authority on a question he has, in 
a fashion, made his own, says: "Intellect- 
ually, and perhaps physically, he (the negro) 
has attained the highest degree of advance- 
ment as yet in the United States. - 

* "The Negro Problem," Pickett, 1909, pp. 399-400. 

' "The Negro in the New World," Sir Harry Johnston, p. 47S. 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

"In Alabama (most of all) the American 
negro is seen at his best, as peasant, peasant 
proprietor, artisan, professional man, and 
member of society."^ 

Race animosities are now abnormal, both 
South and North. The prime reasons for 
this are two: 

I. The bitter conflict during reconstruc- 
tion for race supremacy and the false hopes 
once held out to the negro of ultimate social 
equality with the whites. Among the early 
measures of congressional reconstruction 
was a "civil rights" enactment which the 
negroes regarded as giving to them all the 
rights of the white man. Their Supreme 
Court in Alabama decided, in "Burns vs. 
The State," that the "civil rights" laws con- 
ferred the right to intermarriage. Negroes, 
North, no doubt also believed in this con- 
struction. But the Supreme Court of the 
United States later held that the States, 
and not Congress, had jurisdiction over the 
marriage relation within the States. All the 
Southern and a number of the Northern States 
have since forbidden the intermarriage of 
whites and blacks, and so the negro's hopes of 
equal rights in this regard have vanished. 

* lb., p. 470. 
238 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

This disappointment and his utter fail- 
ure to secure the social equality that once 
seemed his, have tended to embitter the 
negro against the white man. 

2. Whites have been embittered against 
blacks by the frequency in later years of 
the crime of the negro against white women. 
This horrible offence began to be common 
in the South some thirty-two or three years 
since, or perhaps a little earlier, and some- 
what later it appeared in the North, where 
it seems to have been as common, negro 
population considered, as in the South. The 
crime was almost invariably followed by 
lynching, which, however, was not always 
for the same crime. The following is the 
list of lynchings in the sections, as kept by 
the Chicago Tribune since it began to com- 
pile them: 

1885 184 1893 200 

1886 138 1894 190 

1887 122 1895 171 

1888 142 1896 181 

1889 176 1897 166 

1890 127 1898 127 

1891 192 1899 107 

1892 205 1900 107 

239 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

1901 185 1906 66 

1902 96 1907 68 

1903 104 1908 100 

1904 87 1909 87 

1905 66 1910 74 

The general decrease, while population is 
increasing, is encouraging; but lynching it- 
self is a horrible crime ; and lynching for one 
crime begets lynching for another. Of the 
total number lynched last year, nine were 
whites ; sixty-five were negroes, among them 
three women; and only twenty- two were 
for crimes of negroes against white women. 
The other crimes were murder, attempts to 
murder, robbery, arson, etc. 

Census returns indicate that in the coun- 
try at large the criminality of the negro, as 
compared with that of the white man, is 
nearly three times greater, and that the 
ratio of negro criminality is much higher 
North than South. Such returns also in- 
dicate that so far education has not lessened 
negro criminality,^ but it is not known that 
any well-educated negro has been guilty of 
the crime against white women. 

' "The Negro Problem," William Pickett, pp. 136-38. Rare 
Traits, etc., of the Negro, Statistician, Prudential Ins. Co. of 
America, p. 219 et seq. 

240 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

In the South the negro is excluded from 
many occupations for which the best of 
them are fitted, but in the North his 
industrial conditions are worse. Fewer 
occupations are open to him and the wisest 
members of his race are counselling him 
to remain in the more favorable industrial 
atmosphere of the South. 

The dislike of negroes for whites has been 
increased South by the laws which separate 
them from whites in schools, public con- 
veyances, etc. But it is to be remembered 
that these laws were intended to prevent 
intermarriage; they are in part the result of 
race antipathies. But the sound reason for 
them is that they tend to prevent intimacies 
which, at the points where the races are in 
closest touch with each other, might result 
in intermarriage. Professor E. D. Cope, of 
the University of Pennsylvania, one of the 
very highest of American authorities on the 
race question, in a powerful article published 
in 1890,^ advocated the deportation of the 
negroes from the South, no matter at what 
cost. Otherwise he predicted eventual amal- 

1 "Two Perils of the Indo-European," The Open Court, Janu- 
ary 23, 1890, p. 2052. 

241 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

gamation, which would be the destruction of 
a large portion of the finest race in the world. 

This little study now comes to a close. An 
effort has been made to sketch briefly in this 
chapter the difficulties the South has en- 
countered in dealing with the negro prob- 
lem, and to outline the measure of success 
it has achieved. However imperfectly the 
author may have performed his task, it must 
be clear to the reader that no such problem 
as the present was ever before presented to 
a self-governing people. Never was there 
so much need of that culture from which 
alone can come a high sense of duty to 
others. The negro must be encouraged to 
be self-helpful and useful to the community. 
If he is to do all this and remain a separate 
race, he must have leadership among his 
own people. In the Mississippi Black Belt 
there is now a town of some 4,000 negroes, 
Mound Bayou, completely organized and 
prospering. It may be that in the future 
negroes seeking among themselves the amen- 
ities of life may congregate into communi- 
ties of their own, cultivating adjacent lands, 
as the French do in their agricultural vil- 
242 



AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 

lages. Wherever they may be, they must 
practise the civic virtues, honesty, and obe- 
dience to law. W. H. Council!, a negro 
teacher, of Huntsville, Alabama, said some 
years since in a magazine article: "When 
the gray-haired veterans who followed Lee 
and Jackson pass away, the negro will have 
lost his best friends." This is true, but it is 
hoped that time and culture, while not pro- 
ducing social equality, will allay race ani- 
mosities and bring the negro other friends 
to take the place of the departing veterans. 

The white man, with his pride of race, 
must more and more be made to feel that 
noblesse oblige. His sense of duty to others 
must measure up to his responsibilities and 
opportunities. He must accord to the ne- 
gro all his rights under the laws as they 
exist. 

The South is exerting itself to better its 
common schools, but it cannot compete in 
this regard with the North. Northern phi- 
lanthropists are quite properly contributing 
to education in the South. They should 
consider well the needs of both races. Any 
attempt to give to the negroes advantages 
superior to those of the whites, who are now 
243 



THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 

treating the negro fairly in this respect, 
might look like another attempt to put, in 
negro language, "the bottom rail on top." 

Looking over the whole field covered by 
this sketch, it is wonderful to note how the 
chain of causation stretches back into the 
past. Reconstruction was a result of the 
war; secession and war resulted from a move- 
ment in the North, in 183 1, against condi- 
tions then existing in the South. The negro, 
the cause of the old quarrel between the sec- 
tions, is located now much as he was then. 
How full of lessons, for both the South and 
the North, is the history of the last eighty 
years! 

There is even a chord that connects the 
burning of a negro at Coatesville, Pennsyl- 
vania, by an excited mob on the 13 th of 
August, 191 1, with the burning of the Fed- 
eral Constitution at Frarningham, Massachu- 
setts, by that other excited mob of madmen, 
under Garrison, on the fourth day of July, 
1854. One body of outlaws was defying the 
laws of Pennsylvania; the other was defy- 
ing the fundamental laws of the nation. 



244 



INDEX 



Abolitionists, mobbed, 71; bum 
U. S. Constitution, 72; private 
lives of leaders irreproachable, 
8g; become factor in national 
politics; Boston captured by; 
"slave-catchers" now mobbed; 
national election turns on vote, 
g5-6; anti-slavery in Faneuil 
Hall, 97; election again turns 
on vote of, gg; impartial ob- 
server on influence of, 105 ; Pro- 
fessor Smith on, 106 

Abolition petitions in Congress, 
influence of, 102 

Abolition societies, in 1840, g3 

Adams, John Quincy, becomes 
champion of Abolitionists, go; 
defends right of petition, 91 

Alien and Sedition laws, i7g8, 18; 
nature of, ig 

Americans, world's record for hard 
fighting, 201 

Andrews, Prof. E. A., slavery con- 
ditions South, 7g 

Anti-slavery people and Abolition- 
ists grouped, 104; Douglas 
charged ''Black Republican" 
party with favoring "negro citi- 
zenship and negro equality," 167 

Aristocracy in South, 159, 160, 161 

Articles of Confederation, 15 

Author, antecedents, explanation 

of, lO-II 

Author's conclusions, 242-3-4 

Biglow Papers, g7-8 

Birney, James G., mobbed, 87 

Boston meeting, Dr. Hart over- 
looks, 73 

Boston Resolutions, 64 

Burke, Edmund, on conciliation, 
log; spirit of liberty in slave- 
holding communities, 158 

Calhoun, John C, prophecy of, 
167-8 



Cause of sectional conflict. Aboli- 
tion societies and their methods, 
205 

Channing, Dr. Wm. E., encomium 
on Great Britain, 3g; letter to 
Webster, 47; opinion of Aboli- 
tionists, 87 ; his change, 88 

Characters and careers, of Abra- 
ham Lincoln and Jefferson Da- 
vis, i88-ig2 

Churches, North and South, oppo- 
sition to slaver>'; a stupendous 
change, 67; "whole cloth ar- 
rayed against" Garrison, 68; 
Southern churches still defend 
slaverj'; Northern changed; 
Methodist church disrupted, 70 

Coatesville lynching, 224 

Colonies, juxtaposed, not united, 

IS 

Colonization Society, origin of and 
purposes, 44; its supporters, 45; 
making progress; Abolitionists 
halted it, 46 

Compromise of 1850; excitement 
in Congress, 106; great leaders 
in; Webster on 7th of March, 
107; Clay's speech, 112; new 
fugitive slave law gave offence, 
128 

Confederate States with old Con- 
stitution — changes slight, 186 

Constitution, Ahen and Sedition 
Laws first palpable infringe- 
ment, 3; powers conferred by 
discussed, 16; as supreme law 
Southerners still cling to, 207 

Cope, Prof. E. D., advocated de- 
portation to prevent amalgama- 
tion, 241 

Cotton gin, accepted theor>' as to 
denied, 12 

Courage of, and losses in, both ar- 
mies, igs 

Criminality, of negroes greater 
than of whites, 240 



245 



INDEX 



Cromwell and the Great Revolu- 
tion, analog>' to, 8 

Curtis, George Ticknor, quotation 
from "Life of Buchanan," 14 

Davis, JefiFerson, farewell speech, 
181; doubts about success— sad- 
ness, I go 

Democrats, North, opposed negro 
suffrage, 212 

Deportation, no country ready to 
take negro, 82 

Disunion, project among Federal- 
ist leaders, 1803-4, 25; senti- 
ment in Congress, 1704, 24 

Emancipation, easy North; dif- 
ficult South, 40; Federal gov- 
ernment, no power over, 41;. 
status North in 1830, 52 

Emancipations, South, what ac- 
complished in 1831, 50; census 
tables, 51 

Embargo of 1807, why repealed, 
26 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, eulogizes 
John Brown, 15 

Everett, Edward, denunciation of 
John Brown expedition, 152 

Extradition, refused, of abductors 
of slaves. Supreme Court power- 
less, 176 

Federalists, construed Constitu- 
tion liberally, 17 

Fite, Professor at Yale, declares 
Republicans in i860 hoped to 
destroy slavery, 175; justifica- 
tion of secession, 182 

Freedman's Bureau, its composi- 
tion, 221 

Free speech, Channing defends 
Abolitionists as champions of, 
87; John Quincy Adams be- 
comes advocate, 90 

Fugitive slave law. North not 
opposing in 1828, 53; Missouri 
Compromise provided for, 54 

Garrison, William Lloyd, began 
Liberator; personality and char- 
acteristics, 56; key-note, slavery 
the concern of all; slave-holders 
to be made odious, 58 



Godkin, E. L., on negro as factor 

in politics, 237 
Greeley, Horace, draws comfort 

from John Brown's raid, 153 

Hartford Convention, 28 
Helper, Hinton Rowan, his book, 

Higher law idea, prompted Abo- 
lition Crusade — and Czolgosz to 
murder McKinley, 206 

Immigration and Union sentiment ; 
number of immigrants, S3 ; few 
South, 34 

Incendiary literature, sent South, 
62; North aroused; Andrew 
Jackson's message, 63; Boston 
Resolutions, 64; indictment in 
Alabama; requisition on Gov- 
ernor of New York, q8 

Incompatibility of slavery and 
freedom; Lincoln's Springfield 
speech, 81; Garrison first to 
announce doctrine; Abraham 
Lincoln next; then Seward, 
147-8 

Insurrections, Denmark Vesey 
plot at Charleston, sg; Nat 
Turner in Virginia; Walker's 
pamphlet, 60 

Irish patriots, Mitchel and Mea- 
gher, divide'on secession, 35 

John Brown's raid, 149; his secret 
committee, 151 

Johnson, Andrew, succeeding 
Lincoln, carried out plan, 213 

Johnston. Sir Harry, on negro in 
South, highest degree of ad- 
vancement, 257 

Kansas, fierce struggles in; Sum- 
ner's bitter si)eech, 142-3 

Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas 
originated, 135; aggravated sec- 
tionalism, 136 

Kentucky Resolutions, 1798, 19; 
Jefferson the author, 20; copy 
of first of, 21 

Kentucky and Virginia Resolu- 
tions of 1798-9; Secessionists 
relied on, 21; Jefferson and 
Madison's reasons for, 22 



246 



INDEX 



Know-Nothing party, its origin; 
purposes; appeal for the Union, 
140-1-2 

Las Casas, Bishop, advice to King 
of Spain, 237 

Liberia, sending negroes to, called 
"expatriation"; enterprise a 
failure, 46; Lincoln's hopes of, 
81; why it failed — Miss Ma- 
honey's account, 169-70-71 

Lincoln, South no more responsible 
for slavery than North, 40; 
speech at Charleston, 111., 81; 
5nds no country ready to take 
American negro, 82; South in 
i860 thought him radical; had 
favored white supremacy in 
1858, 185; speech at Peoria, 186; 
assassination of, 209 

Lodge, Henry Cabot, declares 
popular verdict against Web- 
ster, 118; he had undertaken 
the impossible, 120; his argu- 
ment good, he not man to make 
it, 121 

Lundy, Benjamin, attempts to stir 
up North against slavery South, 

47 
Lynchings, tables, 239; comments 
on, 240 

McMaster, aflBrms Webster behind 
the times (note), 100 

Missouri, controversy over slavery, 
52; distinct from that begun 
later by "New AboUtionists," 

Mobs, Garrison mobbed; many 
anti-slavery riots North, 71; 
violence toward Abolitionists 
in North reacted, 85; oppo- 
nents became defenders, 86 

Mound Bayou, a negro town, 242 

Nationality, spirit of; causes of, 
development of, 30; grows. 
North; South on old lines, 35 

Navy, U. S., deciding factor in war, 
198-9 

Negro, the. located now much as m 
i860, 7; Lincoln could find no 
home abroad for, 206; reasons 
for smallness of vote South, 233 ; 



improvement; Booker Wash- 
ington's opinion, 236; bene- 
fited by slavery; attained 
South highest degree of advance- 
ment, 237; best opportunities 
South, 241; Confederate veter- 
ans best friends there, 243 

Ohio; Resolutions looking to co- 
operative emancipation; re- 
sponses of other States to, 42; 
Southern reason for, 43; North- 
ern, kindly temper of, 44 

Otis, Harrison Gray, on Boston 
Resolutions, 65 

Pamphlets, venomous one cited, 75 

Personal liberty laws, eleven States 

passed; Alexander Johnston 

says absolutely without excuse, 

'77 , . ^ 

Petition, right of, m Congress, 90; 

"gag resolution," 92 
Political conditions, North and 

South compared, 162-3-4 
"Poor whites," discussion of, and 

of social conditions South, 155- 

6-7 

Presidential campaign i860, ex- 
citement, 171 

Press, Northern slandering South, 
153; Southern slandering North, 
154 

Race animosities, negro's aspira- 
tions to social equality; legal 
enactments, 238; whites em- 
bittered by crime against white 
women, 239 

Reagan, "Republican rule on Abo- 
lition principles," 105 

Reconstruction, Lincoln's theory; 
veto of resolution asserting 
power of Congress over, 208; 
last speech, adhering to plan, 
210 

Reconstruction by Johnson under 
Lincoln plan; wisdom of 
Lincoln-Johnson plan, John 
Sherman; opposition to it par- 
tisan. Senator CuUom, 211; 
South accepts plan; senators 
and representatives, 214; negro 
problem and Jefferson's pre- 



247 



INDEX 



diction, 215; apprenticeship 
and vagrancy laws, Blaine's at- 
tack on, 217 

Reconstruction, Congressional, ex- 
tremists bent on negro suffrage 
when Congress convened in 
1865, 212; preparations for; 
committee of fifteen; Shella- 
barger's appeal to war passions, 
215; South denied representa- 
tion; Southerners reject Four- 
teenth Amendment; Garfield de- 
nounces rebel government, 219; 
Johnson's reconstructed State 
governments swept away; uni- 
versal suffrage for negro; South 
sends Republicans to Congress, 
220; witnesses before "Com- 
mittee of Fifteen" rewarded; 
Southern counsels divided, 223; 
carpet-baggers and scalawags, 
224; intolerable political condi- 
tions; race issue forced upon 
whites, 226; whites recover self- 
government, 227 

Republican party, the modern; 
its origin; Mr. Rhodes on, 138- 
130; nominates Fremont and 
Dayton; denounces slavery; ex- 
citement; defeated, 144 

Resources, war, North and South 
compared, 191-2-3 

Salem Church monument, 9 

Santo Domingo, memory of mas- 
sacre in, 80 

Seceded States, wretched condi- 
tions in 1865, 214 

Seceding States, desire to pre- 
serve Constitution, 179 

Secession, early threats of not con- 
nected with slavery, 26; Josiah 
Quincy threatens, I Si I ; Massa- 
chusetts legislature endorses 
him, 28; in early days belief 
in general, 28; Massachusetts 
legislature threatens, 1844, 20; 
eleven States seceded, 179; Prof. 
Fite justifies, his ground, 182; 
motives for in 1860-1, 183 

Self-government restored ; local 
clashes, no race war; based on 
Lincoln's idea, superiority of 
white man, 229; constitutional 



amendments to restore purity 
of ballot, 233; industrial results 
amazing, 234-5; negro vote 
small — reasons, 231 

Seward, leader of Republican 
party, 178 

Situation in Alabama in 1835 — 
letter of John W. Womack, 79 

Slaverj', Great Britain abolishes, 
compensates owners, 39; South's 
"calamity not crime," 48; de- 
bate in Virginia Assembly, 61 

Slaves, protect masters' families 
during war, 132-3; a surprise to 
North, 133-4 

Slave-trade, New England's part 
in, 37; South protests against; 
sentiment against arises in Eng- 
land, sweeps over America, 38 

Social conditions South, 155-60 

South unwilling to accept idea of 
incompatibility of slave and free 
States, 94-5; bitterness in, loi; 
on defensive-aggressive, 126; 
e.xcited; filibustering; importa- 
tion of slaves, 145 

Spencer, Herbert, slavery once a 
necessary phase of human prog- 
ress, 237 

Sprague, Peleg, on Boston Resolu- 
tions, 66 

Suffrage, Lincoln thought 
Southerners themselves should 
control, 203 

Sumner, Charles, philippic against 
South; Brooks's attack on, 
143-4; negro suffrage to give 
"Unionists" new allies, 220 

Te.xas, application for admission, 
93; Channing threatens seces- 
sion if admitted, 94 

Tilden, Samuel J., letter to Kent, 
secession inevitable if Lincoln 
elected, 172-3-4 

Underground railroads. Professor 

Hart's picture of, 103 
Union, the, Webster's great speech 

for in 1830, 31; effect of, 32 
Union sentiment South; Whigs, 34 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," inlluence 

on Northern sentiment, 129- 

133 



248 



INDEX 



War, the, nature of, i8o 

Washington, a Federalist, i8; his 
appeal for Union, jo 

Webster, on 7th of March, 107; 
his sole concession, 1 1 1 ; con- 
demns personal liberty laws and 
Abolitionists, 115; congratu- 
lated and denounced, 117; 
"Ichabod," 119; Rhodes's esti- 
mate of, 122; his speech for 
"The Constitution and the 
Union"; Wilkinson's estimate 
of, 122; E. P. Wheeler's esti- 
mate of, 125; Webster's opin- 
ion of Abolitionists and Free- 
soilers, 126 



Welles, Gideon, opinion in 1867 as 
to debasing elective franchise, 
232 

Whites, South, fought fraud with 
fraud during Reconstruction, till 
Constitution amended continued 
it, 232; difScultics of their task, 
233; growing spirit of altruism; 
school taxes divided pro rata, 
234 

Wilmot proviso, 1 1 1 

Wisconsin nullifies fugitive slave 
law, 178 

Women, devotion of during war, 
North and South, 195 



249 



APR 



16 1912 



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